Festival marketing: Laptops & tablets add tech glitter

HP, Dell, Lenovo and Sony are luring consumers through various marketing initiatives

Pallavi Goorha Kashyap & Neha Saraiya| Mumbai & Delhi | October 25, 2011

This festival season, consumers are not only spending on consumer durables, clothes and automobiles, even the laptops and tablets category is witnessing a phenomenal response. As with almost 54 per cent of the population in India under the age of 24, they constitute the largest segment of Internet users in the country, thereby making mobility a prime purchase criterion.

Banking on this, many laptop and tablet manufacturers have rolled out innovative marketing initiatives along with a new lineup of products to cater to this audience.

HP is targeting significant long-term growth opportunities and plans to launch a series of all-in-one desktop PCs, unveiling a new portfolio of products that offer consumers powerful and sleek PCs for the family. This includes the upgraded The TouchSmart610, the all-new TouchSmart520, the HP Omni120, the HP Omni220 and the HP DreamScreen400. The company has also rolled out a new TVC in association with MTS and Intel.

Ranjivjit Singh, Chief Marketing Officer, Personal Systems Group, Hewlett Packard India Sales, said, “Today's youth is into creating opportunities and harnessing technology to do so. The TVC taps this ability of the youth. The TVC highlights an instance where HP technology powered by Intel's processing capabilities and MTS's connectivity gives the youth the power to 'create and share' content and 'shine' on. It has a very interesting background score sung by Anushka Manchanda, which helps establish an instant connect with youngsters in the age group of 18-24 years.”

Dell India has adopted the social networking route this festival season.  The company is running an exclusive Facebook contest called 'A unique gift for a unique wish' on Dell's Facebook page. Participants will be asked to share a unique, innovative and out-of-the-box wish for their loved ones, followed by the name of the Dell product that they want to gift the person they are wishing. The message with the most number of votes, based on its uniqueness, will be declared as the most unique wish and the writer will be gifted with the Dell product mentioned in the post. This contest also involves a seven-city on-ground mall activity in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Kolkata.

Shishir Singh, Director- Product Marketing, CSMB, Dell India, said, “While we do not comment on marketing spends, we do have some exciting initiatives lined up for the festive season. We are currently partnering with Star World to bring the exciting world of 'Terra Nova', a drama filled sci-fi series and a Spielberg production, to TV screens. It also features the debut of our Dell XPS 15z TV commercial.”

On the other side, Lenovo India is focussing on tablets as a driver for growth this festive season. Amar Babu, Managing Director, Lenovo India, said, “Tablets are extremely personal technology devices used primarily for data consumption. Lenovo's tablet strategy is to create a family of tablets suited to various entertainment and mobility requirements. So, whether it's the IdeaPad for entertainment or the ThinkPad for business, we have listened to our customers and are delivering Android tablets designed to meet their particular needs. We have also loaded our tablets with a lot of distinct features that will make these machines very appealing.”

To garner a share of this ever-increasing market, Sony India has unveiled a total of 62 models of the VAIO in 16 colour variants.  The company is investing Rs 100 crore towards ATL and BTL promotion during the festive season that includes television and print advertising, OOH, cinema and shop front.

Neha@BestMediaInfo.com / Pallavi.Goorha@BestMediaInfo.com

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