As a leading manufacturer of personal computers, Lenovo is making the effort to edge the competition with its new ‘PC-plus’ products, smartphones and tablets. Ajay Kaul, Executive Director, Global Brand Communications – Worldwide Marketing, Lenovo, tells us about the expansion plans for both categories across markets outside India, China and Brazil, and the reason behind setting up the brand’s global marketing hub in India
By SNEHA ULLAL
Q] What was the purpose behind establishing Lenovo Hub?
The Lenovo Hub was set up sometime in 2007 in Bangalore, about a year and half after Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s PC division. IBM had a decentralized marketing approach, with country marketing teams and their own individual agency structures — which suited well for the brand, given its heritage. But for us, it was important to build a brand from scratch holistically, where we have alignment across all our media, around the world.
Deciding the location of the Hub depended on where the growth of the industry was going to come from — mostly emerging markets like India, China and Brazil. India was picked obviously for its ability to work with global teams and the availability of talent. We work with O&M as our agency partner, who also brought in expat talent as part of this setup. What makes this kind of model click eventually is to not make it extremely India-centric but a true global entity.
Q] How has the IBM acquisition strengthened Lenovo’s brand presence post 2007, especially in India, China and Brazil?
The biggest thing we got from the IBM acquisition was the ThinkPad brand. ThinkPad continues to be a dominant PC brand among both large- and medium-sized businesses. That’s why our initial strategy was to use it as our halo brand. For our consumers, however, the concern was that ‘a Chinese company was taking over an iconic American brand; so are they going to ‘cheapen’ it?’ The onus was on Lenovo to ensure we prove our detractors wrong. We invested in innovations, to make ThinkPad even better. By 2008, media reviews stated that Lenovo had actually made ThinkPad better than IBM did, because in IBM, the PC division was one of many businesses, whereas for us, the PC division was at the core at that point in time. We actually became the global number one PC player in the business space much before we became overall number one.
Q] Lenovo is the biggest manufacturer of PCs in the world, however the demand is going down. How is Lenovo currently dealing with this?
The global PC market, even though the growth rate has slowed down, still happens to be a US$ 200 billion market, of which we own about 16 to 17%. We still have a lot of room to grow in the PC business. Having said that, the ‘PC-plus’ category — which includes smartphones, tablets, etc — is leading to a new era of computing. The numbers continue to be mind-numbing and we have embraced that quite early on. With the smartphone category, which was launched three-to-four years ago, we are already number two in China and globally at number four. Plus, we’ve launched the new Yoga Tablet with actor Ashton Kutcher as the ambassador and the brand’s newest product engineer. In the next two-to-three years, we will see a large part of our growth coming from both smartphones and tablets.
Q] How is Ashton Kutcher’s new appointment as ‘product engineer’ and ambassador going to leverage the brand?
It is not a traditional brand ambassador relationship with Ashton. Apart from his celebrity stature, he is very passionate about technology and has a tremendous social media presence. He also takes personal interest in designing products, so he was looking for a company who would give him that liberty. Lenovo presented to him an opportunity where given our footprint now globally, he found in Lenovo the perfect partner and we found a person who could represent us. The relationship is around tablets and you must have seen him in our new ad when he announced our first tablet product (the Yoga tablet). In the future, he will play an active role in the design, how they appeal to the audiences that we are targeting, and so on.
Q] Do the marketing activities in India differ greatly from abroad? What media activations have worked best for Indian audiences?
‘For Those Who Do’, which has been our global brand platform for two-and-a-half years now, has resonated well with us and it has extended to all our markets. Of course, the ‘glocal approach’ in every country will be different. But the core brand philosophy doesn’t change. In India, for example, cricket and Bollywood are the top passion points for millennials; so we will find ourselves in those channels.
Our campaign is about the doer’s spirit. We try to understand what people do with technology and what it helps them achieve in their lives. The media choices depend on finding enough people in those areas and accordingly targeting them. In India, our global campaign has been received well especially in the urban markets. With the Tier II and III cities, we had to tweak the campaign, by bringing in someone with a mass appeal like actor Ranbir Kapoor, who could also show himself as a ‘doer’, and demonstrate the product effortlessly.
Q] How is the brand promoting its smartphones in India and around the world, despite heavy competition from Samsung and Apple?
Our smartphone category is gradually expanding to countries like India, Indonesia, Turkey and Russia. We went after markets where people actually buy phones in retail, as opposed to western markets where most of the phone sales are tied to the carrier. From the campaign standpoint, the core essence of our smartphones also happens to be ‘For Those Who Do’, but the message is very direct about what the product can do for the consumer. For example, for the Indian TVC for the P780, we highlight the phone’s long battery life (43 hours), which is probably the biggest pain point in smartphones.
Q] What plans are in the pipeline for Lenovo Hub for both its global and Indian consumers? What markets is the brand planning to target in the near future?
Other than the media choices that we make from time to time, our India strategy is pretty consistent with our global marketing strategy. Smartphones and tablets will become a large part of our face of the brand in terms of how we connect with the millennial audiences, who are ultimately the main decision-makers and influencers. All our marketing will be around how we engage those audiences beyond simple TV ads. We want people to interact with the brand continuously, build a mutually beneficial win-win relationship with the brand and give them a reason to come back.
PC-plus is a huge category, which includes smartphones, tablets, but it also has the cloud. So while people have these multiple devices, how do you bring them all together and have a unified experience? So we are focused on bringing that experience with our cloud computing offering. Also in countries like China, we are into smart TVs, which is a growing category for us. The TV category requires a whole new ecosystem to be generated — you want to provide the content providers, you have to court relationships, and you can distribute content globally. We will expand this category to other parts of the world soon.
Feedback: sneha.ullal@exchange4media.com
