How Qualcomm changed its narrative after patents dispute with Apple

Qualcomm Senior Vice President Don McGuire’s July 2021 appointment as chief marketing officer followed a multiyear battle with Apple over patents that had the company in a defensive posture. “We had not proactively talked about the value that we bring to our products, customers, ecosystems, and to society, which left us vulnerable to attack,” McGuire said,

The new game plan was to play offense. “We formulated a consistent and universal narrative about how to talk about the company,” McGuire said. “Then we developed marketing assets that could be used across mediums with key audiences such as policymakers, business decision-makers and ecosystem partners around the world. The last step was to pull together marketing tools so that spokespeople and advocates could both amplify and bring the story to life.”

The results, McGuire says, include a 29% year-over-year revenue increase for the 12 months ending June 30, 2022.

How did the resolution of the Apple dispute impact the company’s plans?  

It really opened the opportunity for us to highlight the diversification and growth we had started to achieve as a business. It speaks to the relevance of the evolution of the mobile revolution and the expansion of technology across our lives. This new approach also involved an audience-led strategic shift, separating the Qualcomm and Snapdragon brands to create a hierarchy of relevance and business value to the audiences most important to each. 

How did you simplify the brand story for a company with 45,000 employees and a range of products and audiences?

For Qualcomm, It’s about communicating the promise of a world where everyone and everything can be intelligently connected through the innovation of our technology development and the power of our products. For Snapdragon, it's about platforms that are at the center of the computer, photography, gaming, audio and productivity experiences on devices our customers bring to market, including smartphones, PCs, autos, wearables and extended reality.

How do you approach the Qualcomm brand?

With Qualcomm, it's about leveraging key moments in time with policymakers—that are important to society and have broad impact—and telling our story in the context of those events and those moments. It will also be about expanding our efforts with ecosystems, investors, and business development managers via new campaigns, messaging strategies, and improvements in our Martech stack that will give us access to new tools. 

What’s the approach for Snapdragon?

Once we established our strategic framework and brand hierarchy, we began to deploy marketing strategies for Snapdragon that are more consumer-facing—both global and local. Our marketing mix includes direct, digitally-led advertising, experiential marketing, co-marketing with our customers and more recently adding global branded technology partnerships with new partners including Ferrari, Live Nation, and Manchester United as well as naming rights to Snapdragon stadium, and our global mobile esports competition, Snapdragon Pro series, in partnership with (esports company) ESL. 

What metrics matter?

Metrics that address the entire audience funnel, including awareness in preference, consideration and purchase intent. Depending on the objective of each initiative, some or all these metrics could be important. But at the end of the day, it's about the result and impact anything we do has on achieving the business objective. We have also elevated the role of net promoter score (NPS) as a KPI in measuring performance going forward. Measuring and tracking NPS more intently will give us a better idea of how we're doing with customers and partners.

We also look to measure ourselves against some of the macro trends going on in the world. We identified in our 2021 investor presentation key trends driving digital transformation. We've been tracking those trends and how we look at product roadmaps, and how we deploy our technology in support of those macro trends.

Recently, we stood up a new practice and a new team was organized to create robust and consolidated intelligence, insights, and analytics. This team will be a central hub for research, intelligence gathering, and measurement as a service to the rest of the organization.

What lessons learned might help other CMOs?

The two biggest lessons learned during the pandemic were around leading with empathy and adapting to a virtual way of doing things. The last two years have taught me to understand the collective yet unique situations that people were going through. All stakeholders, from employees and their families to customers and partners, were experiencing things differently.  

The second is to how is how to adapt to interacting, collaborating and marketing in a completely virtual, and now a hybrid way, to achieve your goals.   

How are you preparing for a possible recession?

Digital transformation is continuing to be prioritized at the enterprise level and people are not going to divorce technology from their lives. One of the things that has become evident during the pandemic is that connectivity is as valuable and as important to people's lives as water and electricity. We don't see that going away—the ability to connect, communicate, entertain and be productive are all going to remain important.