Taking quarters in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Wednesday evening, the company hired tour guides to show the press and analysts some of its early products alongside other innovations, both pragmatic and conceptual.
One of the conceptual pieces of note was an eerie green plastic “mask” for human feeding in a post-apocalyptic world.
On the pragmatic side were some technology products that had at some point been on the market, including a Japanese gamepad-like device for Kanji input, Nick Negroponte and Intel’s early One Laptop Per Child field notebook, and several ThinkPads, the star being the 701c with its “butterfly” keyboard.
The classic squared-off black “bento-box” design and its red TrackPoint accent have been fairly consistent brand elements since the ThinkPad’s creation in 1992 by then-IBM PC division’s chief designer, David Hill. The ThinkPad and the rest of IBM’s PC division was acquired by Lenovo in 2005. Hill gave a brief presentation of some of his design principles as a series of hors d’oeuvre trays circulated through the crowd.
Also present at the reception was another of Lenovo’s Davids.
David Roman, a fairly recent acquisition, came aboard from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to lead the corporate marketing team.
Roman was the force behind HP’s successful “The Computer is Personal Again” campaign, with its “Hands” creative and MTV tie-ins. And he’s back at it with Lenovo, now driving the “Do” campaign, which highlights computers being used in active, often outdoor, situations. Colors this time around include the ThinkPad’s red and black, but with emphasis reversed: the broad strokes are in a bold red and the accents are black, a scheme that perhaps doffs a hat brim toward Lenovo’s home country, China, where red signifies good fortune and joy.
Roman’s efforts have already had an effect in forming a more solid international brand image for a company that had primarily been known as a local champion in China with a successful developed-market commercial notebook business bolted on to the side.
As the Chinese and U.S. teams have worked at blending themselves together, homogenizing what were once quite disparate cultures, the company has attained success in markets where it had scant presence before, helping it rise to the number two vendor worldwide in PC shipments behind HP. The company’s “Defend and Attack” strategy has helped it focus its efforts, defending incumbent territory like commercial notebooks and China overall while attacking new frontiers like developed-world consumer and all segments in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, and India.
For 20 years, commercial entities of all sizes have bought ThinkPads, 76 million of them, in fact. While keeping the basic design and product configurations relatively constant, the ThinkPad team has continued to update the basic subsystems and add new features as they become popular. The X Series has long been about portability, and the T Series has come to represent no-compromise mobile performance. Others in the line include the powerful W Series mobile workstations and several “value” models.
And in the spirit of continuing innovation, Lenovo used the birthday party to announce three new products, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, the next-generation T Series, and the ThinkPad Tablet 2, the first ThinkPad designed specifically for Microsoft’s Windows 8.
The Carbon, which maintains Lenovo's already-established X1 branding and emphasizes the lightweight carbon fiber body material, meets Intel’s standard for an Ultrabook and carries a premium price: $1,299.
The T430u also hits the Ultrabook spec but is more configurable and starts at a much lower price: $779.
Both the T and the X1 will be available in August. The Tablet 2 will ship in October, coincident with the Windows 8 launch. Lenovo also appears to be working with nVidia to bring out a tablet that will run Windows RT, the version of Windows 8 designed for processors licensed from ARM Holdings.
Over dinner, Roman mentioned a marketing effort that highlights just how far Lenovo has come. He said the company is preparing a campaign that will feature ads in English — aimed at the tier 5 and 6 cities in China. The idea is to reap some of the prestige of being a foreign brand in the home country.
Now, that’s thinking outside the bento box.
Disclosure: Endpoint has a consulting relationship with Lenovo.
© 2012 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Twitter: RogerKay
