It may not rise to the popularity of Antiques Roadshow, but Sun Microsystems is betting a new TV show will help boost recognition of its Java software.
The 30-minute programme, called "Mobile Entertainment World," will be sponsored by Sun and perhaps by phone service sellers, said Ingrid Van den Hoogen, Sun's new vice president of brand experience and community marketing. It's one of several efforts the server maker has undertaken as part of a multimillion-dollar programme to make average people aware of the Java brand.
Sun has finished the pilot for the 13-episode TV series, which is geared chiefly for European audiences that are more prone to gadget envy after seeing segments on games and cutting-edge Japanese consumers, Van den Hoogen said at the recent JavaOne trade show.
But Sun still has a long way to go before it gets the average Joe to know what Java's steaming coffee cup logo represents.
Probably a lot of people would say they recognise the Java name, but a "really low percentage" understand what it does, said Greg Sieck, an associate partner at Profit, a San Francisco-based branding company. Getting consumers to understand the "functional benefit of a Java-enabled device -- that's going to be a real tough slog," he said.
Sun introduced Java in 1995 but recognises the branding plan still isn't even halfway done. If establishing the Java brand is a 10-chapter book, Sun is in Chapter Four or Five right now, Van den Hoogen said. "I would argue we are going to do a lot more. We're going to be spinning that up next year," she said, referring to the fiscal year that has since begun, on 1 July.
She declined to share budget figures, but when the campaign began a year ago, the company and partners expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, said Jonathan Schwartz, then head of Sun's software group and now the company's chief operating officer.
Java's promise
Java is software that lets a single program run on a variety of different computers -- for example, those running Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. It hasn't displaced Windows for desktop computers, as Sun had hoped, but it has caught on widely on mobile phones and powerful server computers.
The Java phenomenon is dependent not just on Sun, but also on business partners such as mobile-phone makers Motorola and Nokia and server software sellers IBM and BEA Systems. Indeed, in many cases it's been those partners, not Sun, that capitalised on Java.
Sieck said he believes the Java-branding campaign likely has two motivations: first, to create consumer demand for Java and therefore stronger incentives for technology partners to support it; and second, to instil the idea that Sun isn't just a server maker but also a software company.
High-tech branding campaigns can reach ordinary consumers. The prime example is the Intel Inside campaign, through which the chipmaker partly subsidises PC makers' advertising costs if they include Intel's logo. Intel says the programme is supported by 2,400 PC makers and has been used in $11bn worth of advertisements since it was launched in 1991.
But branding can go awry, even for giants such as Microsoft, whose name is widely recognised. Microsoft dropped a plan to label numerous products ".Net" -- Microsoft's answer to Java, among other things -- after concluding that it wasn't clear exactly what the term meant.
".Net was applied to a ton of products," RedMonk analyst James Governor said. "Microsoft eventually said, 'Hmm, we're not sure that was such a good idea.'"
