MARKETING SPECIAL...Marketing Maven .. Shailendra Katyal

Marketing Maven .. Shailendra Katyal

Winning Switch From Personal Items to PCs

How Shailendra Katyal took Lenovo to No 1 in India

Shailendra Katyal cut his teeth as a marketer at consumer products & services company Marico. After more than a decade of building brands in multiple categories, from Nihar Naturals cosmetics to Hair & Care (a `nonsticky’ hair oil), in March 2011 the 37-year-old IIM-Calcutta alum moved out of his comfort zone and into an industry alien to him: information technology.
It was a leap of faith, but not a reckless one for sure. In the 16 months at the Chinese IT and electronics giant, Katyal has been instrumental in helping the local operation jump to pole position from No 5 two years ago. By more than trebling market share from 5% over this period, Lenovo India has raced ahead of entrenched players such as HP, Dell and Acer. In the January to March quarter of 2012, Lenovo had a 16.7% slice of the PC pie.
Much of those gains have been because of Katyal’s efforts to transform Lenovo’s perception from that of a stodgy enterprise business into a hip youth-centric brand. The stuffy image was a legacy Lenovo inherited when it took over IBM’s personal computer (PC) business globally in the mid-2000s.
Katyal blueprinted a plan to transform Lenovo into a cool electronics firm, targeting young and spendthrift consumers with an aggressive mix of new campaigns and much wider availability of products. Katyal wasted little time in expanding the brand’s presence --both in the real and the virtual world--to make Lenovo products more accessible, across over 1,000 stores, at last count. He also took it within reach of the hyper-networked Gen Y that inhabits social media platforms.
“The past year has been a carefully-chosen balance of building global innovation and technology credentials for the master brand and executing localized campaigns to build youth connect,” says Katyal.
In the era of mobile phones, the PC has become something of a forgotten category. Katyal wants to reverse that. With 800-900 million mobile phone subscribers, he feels that segment may be saturated; PCs, with a penetration of around 10% and over 100 million users, has plenty of scope for growth, reckons Katyal.
Today, assembled PCs account for less than half of the market, compared to three-fourths three or four years ago. Katyal feels this number will further decline. “We have a youth-centric marketing strategy, built around themes such as sports, music and movies, to connect with this audience,” says Katyal.
“Shailendra has played a key role in Lenovo's success. He brings with him a deep understanding of the Indian consumer,” says Amar Babu, managing director, Lenovo India.
In May this year, Lenovo stepped up its marketing blitz by unveiling Bollywood star Ranbir Kapoor as its brand ambassador. It followed this up by launching a slew of products to intensify the battle for first place in a tough market.
“There is a tough fight in the PC market,” Katyal says. “The top three players here have around 13-15% each, unlike in China, where we have 30% share and the second best has around 10%.” In India then, growth is less about grabbing share from the top few players, but more about expanding a relatively small market and inducing more players to buy Lenovo's products.
Katyal's success as a marketing chief may be because he built an ecosystem of creative, media and digital partners, refreshed a bland brand image and made products available in many more stores.
“Marketing computers used to be about the technology inside it, but now it has become about evangelizing its utility,' says Katyal.
“Shailendra has brought his experience from FMCG to immense use in the IT sector,” says Rajiiv Rao, national creative director of ad agency Ogilvy & Mather. “He is willing to take risks, backs good creative and always challenges the agency to deliver better.”
Sameer Satpathy, marketing head at Marico, has known Katyal for around 12 years and says he has grown quickly from a greenhorn marketer to a manager capable of juggling strategic aspects of marketing with an innate feel of consumer needs. “He has used many of these skills to reinvigorate Lenovo in India,” he says.
It is impossible to write on the hi-tech industry—and brands and marketing in it—without mentioning Apple's breathtaking success in this space and how it has completely turned this sector upside down.
Design, functionality and style have all become buzzwords and the legacy players, Lenovo included, have had to play catch up. Katyal dodges the question artfully. “Success in this market is built on having a fresh product portfolio ... Lenovo globally has a four-screen strategy (smartphones,smart TVs, tablets, PCs) and we're constantly introducing new offerings to stay fresh in the consumer's mind,” he says. India is among Lenovo’s top priority markets globally and should soon have all four screens available, he adds, making the brand an even stronger proposition.
Instead, he is marketing Lenovo as computer maker with products available easily, across a broad price spectrum – from Rs. 20,000 up to Rs. 80,000.

SHAILENDRA KATYAL
Marketing Head, Lenovo India
JOINED LENOVO: March 2011
EARLIER STINT: Category Head, Personal Care, Marico
ACHIEVEMENT: Taken Lenovo to No 1 with a 16.7% share in Jan-March quarter
HOW: By targeting young consumers with a mix of new campaigns, new products, more stores, and a wider price range
RIVALS’ TAKE: Lenovo became No 1 by bagging lowmargin government deals; a lightweight on consumer front

RAHUL SACHITANAND MUMBAI ET120731