COMPUTERS To update its folksy image, Gateway puts cow to pasture

However, the company claims it retains the essence of cow.
WASHINGTON POST
NEW YORK -- For years, computer company Gateway Inc. has traded on the South Dakota roots of its founder and chief executive, Theodore Waitt.
Its brand -- either homespun or hayseed, depending on your view -- has been symbolized by a Holstein cow. The white boxes that the computers come in are stippled with black cow spots, as are Gateway Country stores. Waitt even appeared in television commercials with a bantering bovine.
Now, in new ads designed to bolster sales and offer a more upscale image during the crucial holiday season, Waitt has killed the beloved cow.
"I've been calling it the de-prairiefication" of the company, Waitt said in an interview.
Why walk away from a powerful advertising symbol that helped propel Gateway to the top of the home PC business?
Sleek PCs
The answer can be found at a Gateway store off the south edge of Central Park that on a recent day has been turned into an ad hoc commercial set. Sleek, black-and-silver PCs and laptops are surrounded by a dozen filmmakers and spotlighted like movie stars.
When Waitt returned to rescue his foundering company in January 2001, after a one-year hiatus during which Gateway lost significant ground in the PC wars, the first thing he did was change the look of his product. Waitt said: Our desktop PCs are still light gray. Old. Boring. Everyone else's are black or silver. New. Exciting.
But Waitt realized much more was required. The whole company needed a new look, a new feel, a new strategy, he believed -- something more sophisticated, yet mainstream. This meant the cow finally had to be led to the slaughterhouse. Sort of.
Image overhaul
Gateway has embarked on an image overhaul that calls on all the powers of research, design and typography and the semi-science of branding to craft a new image that may not include the cow but retains the "essence" of the cow, as the company likes to say.
To begin to understand what that means, one need only look around the store at the stacks of cow-spotted boxes. The irregularly-shaped Gateway cow spot is gone, replaced by a stylized, symmetrical black spot, designed to evoke "cow" without saying "cow." The old company logo featured a cow-spotted box; the new one shows the Gateway "G" designed to look like a computer "on" button turned on its side and fixed atop a symmetrical spot. It is meant to convey high-tech competence.
The ad being shot is the work of the Arnell Group, a New York ad shop that captained Gateway's image overhaul and grabbed a chunk of Gateway's ad budget, which approaches $200 million.
This commercial features a couple and their two kids in a Gateway store. The wife is played by a brunette actress who is young and willowy.
"Is she too pretty to be a mother?" muses someone on the set.
The production staff and Gateway reps huddle. They shoot a screen test of a fuller-figured blonde cast as an extra and decide that she -- with some work (i.e., ditch the suede pants) -- looks more like a mom. She fits the image Gateway wants to project in this ad: more mainstream, more minivan.
"OK," says a production designer, "let's mom her up."
Economically, money-losing Gateway had little choice but to seek a new image -- and business plan.
New markets
It is going after the market for digital devices, such as plasma-screen TVs, MP3 music players, digital cameras and video recorders, which is still experiencing double-digit growth and profit margins.
Gateway, which sells about 60 percent of its PCs to home users, is courting more business and government clients because of the home-PC slowdown. Company brass believe the longtime cow motif may be too cartoonish for more sober commercial clients.
Analysts cautiously endorsed Gateway's shifting strategy.
"I don't think [consumers] will hold it against them that they don't have the cow," said Roger Kay, an analyst with research firm IDC. "Any campaign gets old after awhile."
Others disagree.
"The cow motif was one of those odd, quirky, counterintuitive trademarks that succeeded in spite of itself," said Bob Garfield, a columnist for Advertising Age. "Because high-tech and folksy had never before been joined into one concept, it imbued the brand with the trustworthiness of good, wholesome folks in flyover country providing value and honest, American hard work. It is simply hard for me to imagine that they're running away from it."