Name Change Brings Qualcomm Branding Full Circle

Last week, Qualcomm announced that henceforth it will use Snapdragon as its main brand in the consumer segment. The first product in the new lineup is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the latest high-end mobile processor. This move represents an important shift in the company’s brand strategy. For simplification, the numbering scheme drops from three digits (e.g., Snapdragon 888) to one (Snapdragon 8). In this case, the 8 represents the top of the line. One assumes that over time there will be Gens 2, 3, and so on.

Companies change brands all the time. Don’t like last year’s colors? Change it up. Young hotshot just out of business school has to make their mark? Out with the old in with the new. Expensive design company needs to justify its existence? A fresh logo.

But this branding change represents a multiyear evolution that has unfurled slowly. Introduced in 2007 to represent Qualcomm’s early mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors, Snapdragon has taken on a life of its own. During the company’s Snapdragon Tech Summit in Hawaii last week, company executives indicated that a lot of the push to elevate Snapdragon and deemphasize Qualcomm in consumer products actually came from Chinese phone makers, which had already begun to use Snapdragon on their devices, sometimes more visibly than their own brands. The name has come to signify premium…