Marketing Insight

Once a fierce competitor to Intel in the CPU market, AMD had slipped into distant second place by the mid-2010s.

The early 2000s had been a golden era, but when Intel’s Core architecture launched in 2006, AMD struggled to match its performance and efficiency standards. By the early 2010s, AMD’s situation was awkward. Its latest FX processors failed to meet expectations, often losing ground even to older Intel chips. Market share in desktop and laptop CPUs had dwindled to single digits. For many, AMD had become synonymous with “budget only”, a brand used when cost mattered more than performance.  For the wider public, AMD was unknown compared to Intel’s distinctive audio branding.

Financially, the company was in trouble. Layoffs, restructuring and a revolving door of leadership added to the issues.

Enter CEO Lisa Su, who was appointed in 2014. Su led the company’s refocus on its engineering efforts. Codenamed “Zen,” the new CPU architecture promised to be a complete reinvention designed with one aim in mind: compete with Intel on raw performance.  By doing this, AMD hoped to regain market share and reverse its brand image of being “budget” rather than “excellent value”.

Media Innovation

In 2016, AMD launched its first generation of Ryzen (Zen architecture) CPUs. Ryzen matched or beat Intel in performance, especially in multi-core workloads.

At the same time, AMD worked hard to make its communications with the PC builders community more transparent and supportive than Intel had up to that time. AMD engaged heavily with the PC building and enthusiast communities on Reddit, Twitter and official forums. In doing so, consumers and enthusiasts could get familiar with the product and its capabilities as early as possible. AMD made sure that product roadmaps and microarchitectural decisions were explained openly through these forums, winning back brand trust and loyalty.

With a better product and communication strategy in place, AMD then went out to the wider retail market with an aggressive price point “more cores for less money”. It ran a co-ordinated campaign aimed at stressing the performance of the product along with its favourable price. It partnered with major YouTubers and PC hardware reviewers, such as Linus Tech Tips, Gamers Nexus, Hardware Unboxed, for early reviews and unboxings to generate interest. It also engaged with other tech influencers to gain as much social buzz as possible. It also sponsored events at CES, Computex and E3, running live benchmarking vs Intel, giveaways and Q&A panels.

Alongside its comms strategy, AMD worked closely with motherboard makers and retailers to market its products as “Ryzen” ready, so buyers would have more confidence when purchasing. This was followed by work with Dell, HP, Lenovo and Acer to retail prebuilt systems with AMD Ryzen CPUs installed, rather than Intel ones. In order to make more casual gamers and the wider PC consumer more familiar with the brand in store, AMD placed branded stickers on new computers in-store at Best Buy, Newegg, Micro Center and Amazon.

Accelerating Growth

By addressing its brand image through product development, competitive pricing and a deliberate marcomms strategy, AMD was able to reverse its negative position. In the year since launching its first generation Ryzen CPU, AMD improved YoY growth and market share by 14%. By 2019, its revenue had increased from $4.3B to $6.48B, reversing a 27% drop in revenue that had been seen in 2015. As a result, AMD’s market share of mobile CPUs (including Laptops) went from 6.4% to 20% by 2020.

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