Make Lenovo a global brand
(People's daily online)
Updated: 2006-06-19 17:01 Yong Tang: How do you feel about working with your Chinese colleagues today?
Advani:We are all united by a common purpose. That purpose is to make Lenovo
a great company. I feel very comfortable working together with my Chinese
colleagues. Executives of Lenovo I have met are very market driven and everybody
understands the importance of marketing and strong brand. We have developed very
close personal relationships.
Yong Tang: Have you encountered any culture shock or misunderstanding based
on cultural difference?
Advani: For the most part the relations are very good because we spend a lot
of time face to face together in US or in Beijing. We will go out for drinks and
talk about our families and show pictures. We have built strong trust. And then
you can do things via emails.
One time when I came up with a Lenovo branding strategy, we had different
opinions. Right now Lenovo is such a strong brand in China that sometimes we are
also building sub-brands like Yantian and Tianjiao. But for a global strategy, I
told my teams that we should not build products of sub-brands other than
ThinkPad. I want to do a master brand, the brand of Lenovo is what I want to
build. So the names of the products are less important. I don't want people to
say I have got Yantian PC. I want them just to say I have got Lenovo. When
people buy a Samsung cell phone they didn't say they buy H256. When people buy
Panasonic TV they will not say they bought 43 inch Panasonic with DLP
projection. So Samsung and Panasonic and Microsoft and Intel are all master
brands. We want to build master brand for Lenovo.
But some Chinese colleagues in Beijing said, no, no, we have to get exciting
names for our product lines. But I said, no, we have to focus, we only have so
much money and so much energy and so many people, we have to focus everything on
one thing. Some Chinese colleagues still insisted that, no, we have Yantian. So
we had a face-to-face meeting. I explained the rationale in more detail. They
completely understood what I was trying to do and thought it was a right thing.
At the very beginning there were just emails. It was not enough to come to
agreement. It is also not my style to say, I am the Chief Marketing Officer, I
have decided to do something. That doesn't work. People need to understand why
and what is your point of view. So when we encounter issues like that, we can
resolve it if you have good personal relations and talk about it face to face.
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