HCL has come out with a new campaign to promote its ME range of laptops.
It looks like the trailer of a movie. The film opens with a bold proclamation: HCL Productions Presents. A voiceover begins: From the Pioneers of Computing.
We see a film poster. The hero and the heroine are posing with a desktop PC in between. The voiceover continues: Comes a riveting story about finding excitement in life on the go. The hero, wearing a striped shirt, is driving on an empty road. He sees the heroine waiting at a deserted bus-stop with a laptop called ME.
The hero also takes out a laptop and says: “Me for you!” The girl smiles and hops into his car. In the next scene, the lead actors are dancing around a campfire on the beach to music playing on their ME laptops. There are other couples as well sitting on the bonnets of their car with their laptops open.
The next scene shows the hero slide a slim ME under the door and distract the villains who have captured the heroine. He kicks the door open and the villains fall flat. He saves the heroine and says, “ME ko beat karna mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai.” (It’s not just tough to beat the ME, it's impossible.)
In the last scene, we see the heroine sitting on a milestone waiting to elope with the hero. Just then, he comes in his car, gets down and unbuttons his long overcoat. Inside his overcoat we see two laptops jutting out of the pockets. The heroine runs and sits in the back of the car and the two of them come together to kiss, the laptop concealing their mouths. The film ends with a super: ME – coming soon to a store near you.
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Comeback
It is a dramatic effort by HCL to get back into the market for laptops. Why? HCL’s real strength lies in desktops. Though desktops comprise almost 70 per cent of the market, this segment is growing slowly – at around 3 per cent per annum. Laptops, on the other hand, are growing at around 70 per cent. Sleek and portable computing – that is where the future lies. In this space, HCL’s market share is humble at 7 per cent. “We are keen on growing our market share to 20 per cent in two years in the laptop space,” says HCL Technologies Chairman and CEO Ajai Chowdhry.
Chowdhry and his team want to leave nothing to chance. The market, after all, is fiercely competitive. Around 150,000 laptops are sold in the country every month. Hewlett Packard leads the market with a 30 per cent share. It has two brands, Hewlett Packard and Compaq. It is followed by Dell and Acer. Players like Samsung, Toshiba and LG too have their sights set on this market. Compaq is endorsed by Shahrukh Khan, Acer by Hrithik Roshan and Toshiba by Vidya Balan. Clearly, HCL has its task cut out. So far, it has been seen as a price warrior.
To tackle that, HCL partnered with research firm IMRB to conduct an exhaustive study of expectations and gaps. The study revealed that the most emerging market for technology products was amongst college students and young executives who comprise a fifth of the laptop market. Moreover, it is this group that has shown the sharpest increase in penetration across user segments.
The key trend on which the company has based its communication strategy is the increasing need for mobility. However, this can vary according to age. For teenagers, laptops give them a feeling of belonging to their community, while for an employed person it is career growth. Technology and the laptop play an enabling role there. Further, the survey also revealed that a laptop is a very personal and self-indulgent buy. “Our target audience puts friends before family hence they spend up to five hours on the laptop and they're looking for excitement,” says Chowdhry.
Focus on youth
With this in mind, HCL has designed the ME campaign to establish a more youthful and vibrant image of the brand to ensure a stronger connect with Next Gen consumers. “We want to appear as a brand that is fresh,” adds Chowdhry. The rebranding exercise incudes a new range of seven models available in the price range of Rs 19,000 to Rs 65,000 with specially tweaked hardware features. In addition to that, HCL has started 24-hour customer support in eleven languages, a service that no other laptop player provides.
On the advertising front, the brief given to the company's agency of seven years, DraftFCB Ulka, was to up the ante based on the inputs provided by IMRB. The team at the agency then got together and brainstormed for two days in a hotel room. From that meeting, three options emerged. The first was to create communication targeting small town markets, a fast-growing segment. Another option had a lot to do with touch and the competitive advantage of having a large consumer base of desktop users. Finally, the group agreed on the ME concept. “It’s large. HCL is gearing up for mobility products and this works on a functional and emotional level to differentiate it,” explains COO Sanjeev Bhargava.
Naturally, for such a significant move, television alone won't do. Print, outdoor, digital and on-ground activities will all work in coercion. The TVC, which broke on September 24, will run for four to five weeks. There are three edits of 60, 40 and 20 seconds. Of course, none of this has come cheap – the entire initiative is estimated to have cost the company a whopping Rs 50 crore.
Sector experts say that HCL has launched the new range and the campaign at the right time. The market for personal computers – desktops as well as laptops – had taken a beating in the slowdown. The information technology sector cut down its purchases as orders got cancelled. Purchase by government agencies was strong but not enough to make up for lost business from IT companies. Laptops, on the other hand, were hit by the negativity in the consumer market.