Interview with Graham Brown – European marketing manager – BFG
The past couple of years have been a good time to be an NVIDIA board manufacturer. With AMD/ATI on the ropes and PC sales breaking new records every quarter, demand for graphics cards built around NVIDIA GPUs has been insatiable.
Recent Jon Peddie Research figures have revealed that 2007 was a particularly good year, with Q4 2007 showing 27 per cent growth over Q4 2006. There were some promising signs for AMD, especially in the notebook graphics market where it reclaimed a bunch of market share in Q4. However, in the desktop discrete (meaning separate, as opposed to integrated and sometimes misspelled as discreet, which actually means prudent or unobtrusive) graphics market NVIDIA still reigns supreme.
Even in this context, however, NVIDIA graphics card specialist BFG has had a pretty top time of it. Three years ago it was one of many board partners competing for the US market. Now it is a dominant force over there and has successfully expanded into Europe and the UK where, although European marketing manager Graham Brown is too discreet (see what I did there?) to confirm it, they are vying for the number one spot in the enthusiast graphics card market.
With strong incumbents such as XFX and EVGA already established, the first thing I wanted to know when I spoke to Brown was the reason behind this strong showing.
GB: The company all the way up to the CEO is made up of gamers, so we wear our hearts on our sleeves when we work and this shows in our products. Our customer support and RMA (return merchandise authorisation) performance is something we’re really proud of. Also we have set the standard for warranties in offering 10 years in the UK and lifetime in the US.
We make a point of trying to add as much value as possible for consumers. We’re well known for our overclocked cards and have custom designed our ThermoIntelligence cooling technology to ensure great performance and stability.
Obviously the channel is very important for us and we have developed an extranet that offers a broad range of resources for resellers, from product information to marketing materials. We also try to assist the channel by educating the market. For example, for consumers less familiar with the graphics card market there is www.bustype.com, which offers guidance on the basics, such as what kind of motherboard bus type a user has. For those wanting to know a bit more about BFG technology, as well as our main website we have www.thermointelligence.com to explain the advantages of that technology.
