The world of technology has evolved from being complex to becoming simple and intuitive. With high disposable income, good purchasing power and high aspirations, today’s generation is more demanding.
The Challenge
Engaging with this digitally connected generation and becoming the ‘cool’ brand is a challenge. For Lenovo, the task was to move away from the idea of “think global, act local” to “act global, act local”.
The 2005 acquisition by IBM gave Lenovo global scale. Before the acquisition, Lenovo was an emerging player in the market. This proved to be a new brand positioning for Lenovo. The reasons for Lenovo’s success include ‘sexy products’ that perform, partnership with Intel, Microsoft, Google etc and the brand building.
Shailendra Katyal, CMO, Lenovo
The Strategy
Lenovo aims to adopt a good amalgamation of the eastern values of management and the western values of management in its communication. Lenovo aims to differentiate itself from other brands on the basis of connecting with the consumers and keeping itself premium yet mass.
The strategy for Lenovo involved building a brand and a culture. The main positioning for Lenovo is that it is a brand that is meant for people who believe in doing something. The philosophy of DO brand, DO culture, DO machines along with strong R&D and engineering capability enables the brand to connect with consumers and position it in their minds. Keeping a close eye at the social network, the brand has come to realise that the launch of its products gets great reviews from the blogger community and from opinion leaders in the technology sector.
For marketers today, keeping a tab on the changing consumer behaviour becomes imperative. Same has been the case with Lenovo. As people are on the move, they want technology everywhere. Further, the relationship between consumers and marketers is fast evolving as well. There is a general feeling in the industry that the consumer is no more loyal. Shailendra Katyal, CMO, Lenovo, however, sees a reverse trend where consumers today seek a lot of intimacy. Strong brands are becoming stronger because they are providing intimacy and loyalty as a characteristic is becoming stronger and deeper.
The Implementation
The evolved relationship between the consumers and marketers does not end at print ads, hoardings, coupons and freebies. Marketers mostly depend on fear led and motivation led advertising. Some kind of advertising makes marketers the God, where they feel they can change behaviours. In the other type of advertising, marketers swing to the other side where they ask the consumers about what kind of products and advertising they want. For Lenovo, both models are flawed as the brand believes in playing the role of a lover. Lenovo believes in wooing consumers, getting more intimate and knowing the consumer better.
As a part of providing good after sale service, Lenovo has come up with a provision wherein a troubled consumer need not go through various channels like the distributor, the call centre, the marketing team. The consumer can directly write to the company’s MD and get an assured response within 24 hours.
Another strategy for Lenovo has been to expand its network in Tier II and Tier III cities. When a consumer sees an advertisement of a product, he doesn’t know where to buy it from. In Tier-II and Tier-III consumers tend to go to a store which mostly is a multi-brand store with not much too offer in terms of experience. Lenovo has thus targeted this region by setting up 1000 new stores.
However, Lenovo has not limited its positioning as a mass or a premium brand only. It has lately launched ultrabooks, which start from Rs 50,000 and this is their entry into the premium category. If a brand desires to have market leadership, it can’t be present in one niche. It should be able to straddle between premium to mass to price warrior.
The reason for keeping a wide approach can be attributed to the complex nature of India as a country which is unlike the western society where one just has just one theme or one programme. One size fits all doesn’t work due to the economic, social and cultural disparity. A brand thus has to play across multiple buying segments. In order to connect with the younger audience, Lenovo found its passion points with youth in sports, music and movies. It got associated with MTV Roadies, DLF IPL, Sunburn festival and the film Transformers as well.
The presence on social marketing sites is another way in which the brand is connecting with the youth as this is a cost efficient and powerful method of communicating as the marketer is putting money where their mouth is. Lenovo also believes in the philosophy of one brand, one voice as the attention span of youth is fragmented. By having the same message across multiple media brings about brand singularity, authenticity and consistency.
Results
The Lenovo page on Facebook has received 1,50,000 likes. The brand claims to be the fastest growing PC communities in India where one fan is added every 10 minutes without any media buys.
In terms of purchase preference, the brand enjoys a 12.5 per cent share which is now moving up to hit leadership scores. The market share of Lenovo was 9.2 per cent in 2010 which is now 12.7 per cent.
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