Creative is truly a global company, based in Singapore and targeting a 18 - 49 year old market. Traditionally, they always bundled their products with major PC manufacturers and avoided appealing to the high end side of the PC audio marketplace. It was always viewed as the perfect peripheral to a prepackaged system. Today, they are considered low end, as Bose, Harman Kardon and JBL started integrating with the personal computing community. Creative is considered a step down today. They are trying to build their brand back within the MP3 space and sales indicate they are succeeding.
The award of the ZEN Patent in August 2005 was an important milestone in our research and development efforts, particularly for personal digital entertainment products. It recognized our early innovation and development efforts in portable media players. The ZEN Patent was awarded to Creative for our invention of the user interface for portable media players, including many of the Creative ZEN and earlier NOMAD® Jukebox MP3 players, and found in some competing players, such as the Apple® iPod® products, and certain cell phones with music functions. The ZEN Patent covers the user interface that enables users of portable media players to efficiently and intuitively navigate among and select tracks on players which store large numbers of songs.
--Excerpt taken from the 2006 Annual Report located at http://www.creative.com/corporate/investor/reports.asp
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5 comments:
Creative was always the cheap add-on at COMPUSA or Best Buy when trying to upgrade my PCs audio!
This is an interesting choice for me in that its not what I would consider a brand with a strong image. Its seems from your post that they have succeeded in making products that are price leaders, reliable and work well, which is why you keep buying them. When I think of the word creative, I think of cutting edge technology and flawless design. This immediately brings my mind to...I'm sure you can guess it...Apple. When I think of MP3 players, I only think of two, IPOD and all the others.
A little feedback on the design of your site:
I generally like reversed type blogs. It's such a stark way to display information. But, if I might make a suggestion, the sans serif white type on the black is pretty tough to read. If you're after italics, maybe try bumping up the point size a little bit. The extra heft will help hold those skinny little letters together better.
I have to say, I don't think I'd heard much about the Creative brand before reading your posts. I wonder if that's because I've been a mac gal for so long or if perhaps the Creative brand name is as strong in the Video Journalism field as Mac is in the VisCom side of things. Is Creative more of a MP3 only kind of company, or do they have a larger portfolio of sound and music players?
I also must confess, while I'm a music fan, I've never been one to keep up with all the excellent gadgets that have developed over the years. So, it's entirely possible I've just missed the boat on this brand.
I too am a iPod devotee, so reading about Creative's product was interesting. Like Gerry, my only previous experience with that brand was in bundled packages...
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