MARKETING SPECIAL......Doers Not Thinkers

Doers Not Thinkers  How do you change passive consumers into `those who do'? David Roman, Lenovo's chief marketing officer speaks to Ravi Balakrishnan on crowdsourcing and living up to the `For those who do' tagline What were the most challenging parts in transforming  Lenovo from being about desktops and laptops to a more  consumer facing company with a smartphone and  tablet business? I came on board at a time when the CEO had identified the necessity of build just because they are the ones who buy but they are the ones who care. They want products from companies they believe in, who share their values. We identified the energy and dynamism of the company that we had internally, but people never saw outside. We found that resonated really well with the youth. The youth market is very consistent. College students in Beijing have more in common with students in Bangalore than with their own parents. They look at music, videos and brands the same way. It allowed us to be more interesting in our communication. So how did you go about building this engagement? As marketing professionals, we were trained to craft the perfect story which we then controlled, and used the media to get it out. That doesn't work with youth. They want to be part of creating the story and in return will communicate it for you. It's how we developed the new logo. We began by thinking of it as a digital asset: something flexible that people can experience in a multimode multimedia way. To a classically trained marketing person this is anathema! But that in turn made people excited about a logo change. How do you get people involved? How do you get past the why should I care what's in it for me? The millennial market looks at things differently. The value to showing what they can create is greater than it was in a previous generation. It's why some of them risk their lives taking videos on GoPro. What they want is a venue and opportunity to display creativity but it has to be real. People operate at different levels. Some want to help and others don't. It becomes self-selecting. So, what works and what doesn't? You have to be genuine. You can't fake anything that's not 100% authentic. You have to give up control and make people feel they are working with you. We spend money differently too. We do things on the net not because it's `free' but instead of going to one agency, we spend on different activities. If communication should start moving towards engagement, how do you ensure people are engaging with your brand and not just an interesting piece of content? It's an eternal question. You have to be less prescriptive. When you engage with the audience, it is conversation. If you assume you know the outcome, it's a speech. The mindset of going from mass communication to engagement is you don't really know the end point or the various stages. We develop a lot more material than we did in the classical model. We put it out, monitor and modify it. The assumption is not that you just put it out there and it stays the same for a period of time. The elephant in the room has been whether engagement adds up to sales. Are sales generated by engagement or is there an entirely different set of drivers in operation for that to happen? We have that conversation internally all the time! In my opinion,  there's no choice. If we want to be relevant, we have to engage. If we want to be a successful business, we have to sell. As marketers, we have to become better at broadening the set of metrics we use showing them as relevant to growth of the business. On the business side, we have to build value over time. The healthy tension of those extremes builds a strong company. When a company is growing it's an easier conversation to have. When it's not, it gets ten times as difficult. Ashton Kutcher has been working with Lenovo as product engineer. Is that just a rebranding of “brand endorser“? It really is not! He genuinely considers himself a technology person. He is a very early investor in internet and software technology companies. Remember, he was studying to be an engineer when he became a model and actor. He still has that mindset. When we spoke to him, he said `I don't want to endorse. I want to develop.' For instance, he forced us to make investments in sound in our tablet. We don't give him lines or do traditional ads. We just show him doing what he does best: working with developers. I see that longterm as being a great asset since it helps engagement. He doesn't talk about products he's not involved with. He represents this audience perfectly: genuinely passionate and truly engaged.

ravi balakrishnan

ET4MAY16