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July 17, 2003 – The battle of the brands has begun.
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DuPont raised its flag first. In April, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. announced that its line of organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays would be known by the brand name Olight.
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Osram Opto Semiconductors Inc., a subsidiary of giant lamp maker Osram GmbH based in Munich, got into the game May 13 with the premiere of its Pictiva brand of OLED displays. The company plans to begin production by the end of 2003.
Kodak unveiled its OLED brand, NuVue, on May 20. The Rochester, N.Y., based company also announced that its EasyShare LS633 digital camera would be its first product with a color active-matrix OLED display.
Made of nanostructured polymer films, OLED screens emit their own light and are lighter, smaller and more energy efficient than conventional liquid crystal displays. To marketing and branding experts, the fact that three Fortune 500 heavyweights are vying to make OLED technology a consumer proposition suggests that the market for next generation nano-powered displays will be a real contest. According to research firm DisplaySearch, the market for OLED displays will grow from $112 million worldwide in 2002 to $3.1 billion by 2007.
Sony announced in early June that it will spend $76.6 million to ramp up production of OLED displays in a joint venture with Toyota Industries that already produces liquid crystal diode (LCD) displays. The company expects mass production of OLED panels to begin by the spring of 2004.
Of course, consumers may not care that they’re buying nanotechnology, but they may buy what OLEDs promise: brighter images with broader color spectra and wider viewing angles, as well as lower power consumption, than existing LCD technologies used in laptops and cell phones.
“We wanted to give consumers a name for this great experience, and have them associate that with Kodak,” said Joseph Runde, director of communications for Kodak Displays. Kodak has developed its “small molecule” OLED technology with Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd., and aims to bring its OLED screens not only to its own cameras, but also other devices such as PDAs, portable DVD players and other hand-held electronics.
It has already licensed passive matrix versions of its OLED screen technology to Pioneer Corp., TDK, eMagin Corp. and others. At a recent Society for Information Display conference, Runde reported that Audi displayed a prototype dashboard built around a Kodak OLED screen. Because “creating, building and sustaining a brand costs money,” Runde said, the company first did market research to determine whether distinguishing its screen technology from LCDs made financial sense. The company showed side-by-side comparisons of LCD screens and Kodak’s OLEDs, he said, and 70 percent were willing to pay as much as a 30 percent premium to have the brighter, more colorful screen.
Next came the task of developing a name and a logo that supported the messages of OLEDs’ virtues. NuVue won out over about 1,000 name candidates, said Runde, because it conveys the idea of a “new way of viewing.” The logo also suggests the wide viewing angle OLED tech offers.
And now the true brand building can begin. But it won’t be through a big advertising campaign. “The best place for consumers to see this is in a product, not an ad,” said Runde. “The Sony Trinitron didn’t start in a media campaign. It happened in electronics stores where people could see that the Trinitron looked better than other televisions.” Runde said that Kodak wants to make NuVue a feature consumers seek out. The brand could be revealed on the screen itself when it is turned on, as well as on the package and the device.
Through a spokesman, DuPont said that Olight is intended to serve as the brand for its full roadmap of OLED products, including passive and active matrix screens on glass substrates. The company’s ultimate aim is to develop full-color active matrix screens that can be applied to plastic substrates.
Aubrey Balkind, chief executive of Frankfurt Balkind, a 20-year-old agency specializing in the creation and building of brands such as Adobe Acrobat and About.com, sees the OLED land grab in two lights. DuPont has a strong record in developing brands such as Lycra and Teflon, while Kodak has had a long history of marketing directly to consumers (“Share Moments. Share Life.”) On the other hand, Balkind believes, multiple brands for a display technology embedded in other devices could create confusion for consumers. Balkind predicted that in the end, “one will probably triumph” and become synonymous with the new technology, much as TiVo has become the quasi-generic term for digital video recorders.
Balkind thinks the smart money is with DuPont’s Olight. “It’s got the biggest idea and a kind of timelessness to it,” he said. Kodak’s NuVue, Balkind observed, has the potential problem of sounding not so “Nu” in a few years. Pictiva sounded a bit generic to Balkind’s experienced ear.
In fact, while the branding guru liked Olight, he did have one critique. One of the principal technical virtues of OLED screens is that they emit their own light, whereas LCDs require backlighting. “Maybe DuPont should have called it GloLight,” he suggested.