After over one and a half years of have been trying to penetrate the market of home-entertainment computers with Viiv-branded devices, Intel Corp. is giving up and will focus on promotion of Intel Core trademark instead. According to media reports, the business PC oriented vPro brand-name will no longer see a lot of publicity.

“We decided that it would be better to have fewer brands and make those as strong as we can – Centrino for mobility and Core basically for all the other computing segments we’re addressing in the client space,” said Vince Thomas, brand strategist in Intel’s corporate group, in an interview with Cnet News.com web-site.

Analysts believe that weak perception of Intel Viiv and Intel vPro among targeted audiences is a consequence of Intel’s failure to determine exact benefits that the appropriate platforms offer. If Intel Centrino is associated with long battery life and wireless Internet, whereas Intel Core 2 is known for high performance, then Viiv and vPro have never been considered as ultimate entertainment or advanced business PCs.

In addition to relatively weak branding campaign for Viiv and vPro, computer makers were generally reluctant to employ the new brand-names, as all of the PC suppliers nowadays have their own product lineups aimed at different types of customers and, for example, Dell would not like “Intel Viiv” to prevail over “Dell Dimension”.

Even though Viiv and vPro will remain on the Intel Core logotype to differentiate the designation of the appropriate platforms, they will be in the form of “Intel Core 2 with Viiv” starting from early 2008. Therefore, Intel’s branding efforts will again be focused around the brand-name of a microprocessor, which means that in certain cases the company will not emphasize the number of processing engines of its chips as it does now by adding “Duo” or “Quad” suffixes to its Intel Core 2 trademark.