When Ravi Bharadwaj, the executive director of marketing for personal computer major Dell India, visited customers, he would come back surprised. His customers increasingly voiced one thing – the complexity of technology and the need to simplify it.
Struck by this, Bharadwaj decided to have a campaign built around simplicity across all stakeholders, be it a consumer who wants to use technology, distributors and sub-distributors or a retail entity which needs to understand technology so that it can sell Dell’s products to technology heads in IT companies. These decision-makers who have stalled buying decisions partly due to complexities in moving technology into newer domains are yet to be convinced by companies’ wares.
Also, in the last few years, Dell has been transforming itself into a services company rather than a box provider and this campaign aims to drive home that point.
In line with this, Dell has launched a new campaign that focuses on achievement. The earlier campaign, which had the tagline “Power to do more”, has now been taken to its next logical step, ‘Achieve more’. Complexity is not something new to Dell. For Dell’s enterprise customers it is termed ‘business achievement’ while for personal computing it is termed ‘personal achievement campaign’.
As the company explores going private (at the time of writing this Dell shareholders are still deciding on the best way to take it off the markets), acquiring more than a dozen companies in the last two years has increased complexity, though unintentionally.
This complexity has affected certain businesses within the company, resulting in the loss of market share to competitors such as Lenovo and HP. So the company and the agency came up with a strategy to reach out to audiences, through traditional media such as print, billboards and new media such as Internet and social media. “The message is simple: For individuals what they can creatively do with technology, and for companies, ways to leverage the best out of their existing IT systems and investing in technologies for the future,” says Bharadwaj.
The campaign, conceived with Grey Group, consists of two real life stories, one of a yoga enthusiast and the other of a bike sentimentalist who remodelled his bike using Dell’s technologies. This will be run across print, television and new media such as micro sites, and social media discussion rooms will be set up. www.achievewithdell.in will encourage users to share their experiences with Dell’s products.
But isn’t this the message that competitors such as HP take to the market? With a firm nod, Bharadwaj insists that Dell’s technologies are open and not bound by proprietary technologies that do not give a user an option to buy different technologies for business use.
With the spate of recent acquisitions, Dell has gone in for non-proprietary technologies, notably enterprise security software makers such as Sonicwall and Quest and in the area of network switches (used to power the Internet) with Force10 Networks.
“Our acquisitions were around companies that have service support till the end of a technology lifecycle that others have conveniently chosen to overlook, and easy migration,” says Bharadwaj.
The company had a similar advertisement message which it launched in the second half of the last decade. In the past, it roped in Raman Roy, considered the father of the Indian BPO sector, Neeraj Roy, CEO of Hungama Digital, and other business achievers. It had targeted small and medium businesses that wanted to convey their aspirations to a larger set of customers.
The next step is to take it across the board from individuals to small companies to large enterprises, reasons Bharadwaj.
The company is trying to market its new concepts such as the various usages of virtualisation technologies and extending this concept to newer areas such as virtualising networks or storage. Virtualisation technologies allow higher computing power without having to use more computer servers.
“Technologies like virtualisation allow customers to maximise their investment on infrastructure and press on in the journey towards cloud computing without having to worry about technology obsolescence,” says Bharadwaj.
Take the case of Yashraj Films, another company that is a part of this campaign. For it, newer business models such as digitisation and entertainment content delivered across different gadgets such as phones and tablets is something that Dell will work along in its journey.
Other industry watchers believe that Dell wants to broaden its customer base. “The campaign involving people suggests that Dell wants to reach out to a wider audience than before,” says Geetanjali Kirloskar, the CEO of ad agency Q:uadrant.
This mix-and-match strategy of reaching out to a wider audience arises from the fact that 70 per cent of the company’s revenues come from the consumer segment. Michael Dell has been often quoted that the company will be always focused on the consumer segment at a time when peers such as HP and others are struggling to fuel growth as consumers are moving away from traditional devices to smartphones and tablets.
According to research firm IDC, last year saw almost 500 million smartphones shipped, which is twice the total PCs, laptops and servers put together, according to data from research firms.
Some ad agencies are not convinced about the way this message has been taken to market and feel that this is more old than new.
“If you factor in transformation (from box to services), the technology shifts (like cloud computing, smartphones, social media), the campaign does not bring out paint the whole picture,” says an account manager with a multinational agency.
In the light of changing tech shifts and internal transformation, Dell faces a lot of challenges. “Our transformation journey is over and we are ready to reclaim our number 1 spot,” asserts Bharadwaj. Brave words, but the company has still some catching up to do.