Marketing of Lenovo Personal Pc

Marketing of Lenovo Personal PC

1. Introduction

Lenovo Group Limited is today the third largest personal computer manufacturer in the world, after Hewlett-Packard and Dell of the US, and is tied with Acer of Taiwan. Lenovo creates the most innovative products and services in the personal computing industry. A global technology leader for 22 years, Lenovo offers a worldwide product line that includes ThinkPad notebooks, ThinkCentre desktops, and award-winning "air-bag" and fingerprint-reader technologies. Lenovo also commands 30 percent of the PC marketplace in China, the fastest-growing market worldwide, offering a variety of consumer and commercial PCs. Lenovo engineers, programmers and scientists from three laboratories in China, Japan and the United States focus on research and development that solves customer problems and improves productivity. As Technology Equipment sponsor of the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games and the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, Lenovo will be providing the International Olympic Committee with notebook and desktop PCs, servers, storage and other computing equipment. Subscribing to Olympic ideals of international understanding, fair competition and excellence, Lenovo contributes secure, stable computing equipment for the successful operation of the Olympic Games. Let’s discuss its current marketing efforts and problems.

2. Marketing Events: Product, Distribution, Promotion, Price

Product: Lenovo product lines of personal computer have covered all market segments, from high-end to low-end. Combined with IBM PCs, personal computer of Lenovo has 11 series of laptop and 11 series of desktop. C, N, V, Y, G, K, F, T, J, TY, QT, BT, YT, IdeaPad, And Idea Center Series(Including K, Qa) was reserved by Lenovo after abandoned some old type series. ThinkPad (Including R, T, X, XT) and ThinkCenter(Including A, M) Series was mostly designed and made by Lenovo itself, with a few entrusted to Wistron. Product Differentiation is the most significant part in designing Notebook.

-Human-oriented: Five indexes to measure the Human-oriented of personal computer are light, portable, comfortable and easy-to-use, and healthy. Deeply hearing voice of customers, Lenovo constantly improves its product quality. In the premise of quality assurance, Lenovo increased innovation for customers developing more low-power, lighter, and easier to use product. For example: New TianYang M series adopt the floppy drive and no hard drive screw design, this new innovation means that you could clean and maintain your computer in the circumstance without an IT maintenance commissioner; The interpretations of the "MM" (Max ManпјЊMin Mechanism)concept which was created by Lenovo is the largest operation space, a minimum size machines.

-Custom-built Mode: Lenovo raise a principle” To computer user, it is not the higher configuration, the better, but the more convenient to use and reasonable price, the better.” They found a big market. So in order to meet market demand, Lenovo launched some more differentiated and competitive products. Y series, For example, Products introduce a unique design, such as limited edition Winnie the Pooh version, Snow Mountain version, and leather version. Lenovo integrated APS wireless network card of CDMA and hard disk protection system into F21 and apply Dolby sound system to F50.

Promotion: 1. Advertising Activity: Lenovo has been actively sponsoring world sporting events in recent years. Since becoming a partner sponsor of the 2006 Torino Olympics and 2008 Beijing Olympics, Lenovo has already been a famous brand in the world's most populous country. Lenovo also designed the Olympic torch for the 2008 Olympics. Since 2007, Lenovo sponsors the Formula One team WilliamsF1 and in 2006, the National Basketball Association. In 2006 Lenovo used Brazilian soccer professional Ronaldinho to promote new products. 2. Lenovo completes the acquisition of IBM’s Personal Computing Division, making the company the world's third largest computer manufacturer.

Lenovo divides its business model into relationship marketing model and transaction marketing model: relationship marketing model is to establish, maintain and strengthen the customer relationship, as well as other partners. Customers in relationship marketing model are mainly enterprises, institutions, governments, which would usually invite public bidding for purchasing. Transaction marketing model concerns how to help customers increase capacity and the purchase of individual transactions. Customers in transaction marketing model are mainly individual, small enterprises or other organization with a small order. Transaction models are including agents, dealers, retail, direct telephone sales, transaction-oriented customer trends, fashion and personalization. Both models already covered all computer consumer customers. Brand build???

Distribution: Lenovo's has total more than 3,000 agents and dealers in 2008. At present, Lenovo has established throughout the country with multi-channel marketing system which is combined with distributors, agents and dealers. Headquarter of the company set up a special channel management department to be responsible for the development and management of distributors and agents. Lenovo's agent is a multi-level, that is, below an agent there may be two, three agents. Moreover, Lenovo intended to build on IBM's reputation and shared the distribution channel to quicken its World expansion project.

Pricing: Lenovo adopts high-quality, low-price strategy which will help it strengthen its shrinking market share. Lenovo gradually move its production base from China to some less-development countries to cut its price down. For maximizing its profit, Lenovo known for its aggressive pricing strategy in the China. Prices of products cover almost all level of consumers in the world.

3. Problem that Lenovo confronts:

1.

Event: Lenovo, in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, today announced the voluntary recall of approximately 205,000 extended-life, 9-cell battery packs. In the interests of public safety, Lenovo will offer customers free-of-charge replacements for all recalled battery packs. Lenovo has confirmed that notebook computers containing the recalled battery packs may overheat, posing a potential safety hazard to users if the battery pack experiences a strong external impact.

This event implies that although Lenovo emphasizes high-quality, it still neglect some problem about its product. Lenovo recalled the problem-product, but it can’t prevent the impact of this event to its brand loyalty.