Brand "Bend Beyond"

In 1994, when big international brand computers flooded into China, local companies almost collapsed, leaving only Lenovo, whose market share was only 3% at that time. However, ten years later, Lenovo acquired IBM's PC division and took a key step towards internationalization. Judging from the survey results of the three groups of people conducted by "CEConline", Lenovo's brand influence has grown to the point where it is comparable to that of foreign first-tier brands.

It is not only Lenovo that has gone from weak to strong, Sony also experienced a similar butterfly change 40 years ago. In the 1950s, Sony also faced the "Made in Japan" crisis. Low-quality and cheap products were synonymous with "Made in Japan" at that time. For this reason, Sony was determined to make high-priced, high-quality and creative products to reshape the image of "Made in Japan". So, decades later, a global electronics market was born. Sony premium brand.

Building brands through mergers and acquisitions and independent research and development

Similar to many Chinese companies today, Sony did not have the ability to develop core technologies. In the 1950s, although Sony's black-and-white TVs sold well, they had no advantage in technical competitiveness, and the quality of the color TVs it produced thereafter were not ideal. These problems led to huge losses for Sony, and even the brink of bankruptcy. After obtaining a huge loan from the Development Bank of Japan, Sony carried out technology research and development. In 1967, Sony released the Trinitron image tube technology developed by Ibuka himself. This technology made Sony TVs popular worldwide. The huge development debt borrowed by Akio was finally repaid within 3 years. At the same time, this also opened the road to the rise of the Sony brand. The popularity of the Walkman in the 1980s and the PS series in the 1990s made its reputation unparalleled for a while.

Today's Sony has become synonymous with personalized, lightweight, more avant-garde styling and high-end products. Take Sony's notebook VAIO brand as an example, in 1996, in December 2004, Lenovo acquired IBM's global personal computer business signing ceremony.

Sony launches the world's first VAIO home laptop. Entering the notebook market was risky and costly compared to its initial expertise in audition electronics manufacturing, but in just a few years Sony was positioned to become a strong player in the notebook market by accurately positioning itself in a highly competitive industry. one of the brands. The VAIO brand is different from ordinary computer functions, highlighting entertainment and rich audio-visual functions, and this is also Sony's technical advantage. In terms of design and functions, technical innovations have been carried out according to the different target groups.

Looking back at the rise of the Sony brand, it depends on the acquisition of independent research and development capabilities. However, in today's increasingly refined global division of labor, companies rely on a technological breakthrough to maintain monopoly advantages for a shorter and shorter period of time, and when the technological development of the industry is almost mature, they take advantage of the opportunity of resource integration to take the road of acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions. , is another way. Lenovo is in this way to achieve a world-class brand.

At the end of 2004, Lenovo announced the acquisition of IBM's global PC business for $1.25 billion, owned the Think brand, and kept and used the IBM brand logo for 5 years. After the acquisition of IBM's PC business, Lenovo did not immediately endorse lenovo on its PC products, but continued to use the IBM brand, because Lenovo executives knew very well that IBM's global influence was much higher than that of Lenovo, and its high-end business crowd was targeted. Conducive to helping Lenovo transition to a high-end brand. With the help of IBM's "elephant", Lenovo's sales have increased by 30%, and overseas customers have also had a considerable impression of Lenovo's brand and computer quality.

In January 2011, Lenovo Group and NEC Corporation announced the establishment of a joint venture to form a strategic cooperation to jointly establish the largest personal computer group in the Japanese market. In Germany, Lenovo successfully acquired Medion, a company that creates high-quality, innovative and stylishly designed consumer electronics. Through mergers and acquisitions, Lenovo not only acquired technology, but more importantly, increased brand awareness and quickly opened up the Japanese and German markets.

Post-merger integration is the key to brand building

M&A is a shortcut, but post-merger integration is not easy. After the acquisition of IBM's PC division, Lenovo suffered from indigestion for a time, and the brand effect failed to turn into profit, but Lenovo completed the transition and integration of the brand gradually through three stages.

In the first stage, use the IBM brand to show customers that Lenovo will maintain the high quality of the brand; in the second stage, strengthen the Thinkpad sub-brand and launch the Lenovo parent brand (Lenovo) to build the Lenovo brand image faster ; The third stage, giving up the IBM brand in advance. At present, Lenovo's brand identity has transitioned from IBM think to Lenovo think, which to a certain extent has upgraded the original Lenovo "cost-leading" image to a high-quality, high-performance international brand. In 2010, Lenovo ThinkPad ranked first in the "Enterprise IT Purchasing Behavior and User Satisfaction Survey" in the second quarter of the US market research firm TBR (Technology Business Research). This is the fifth time that ThinkPad has won this honor.

In fact, the Think brand is aimed at business users from design concept to appearance and performance. In order to give play to Lenovo's advantages in the consumer market, in January 2008, Lenovo released the consumer computer Idea for the global market. In this way, Lenovo has formed a brand structure in which Lenovo is the parent brand of the company, and the product brands are divided into the "Think" series for the industry and large enterprise customer markets, and the "Idea" series for the consumer market.

After the integration, Lenovo's brand structure is clearer, and the problem of product line confusion has been solved (a batch of past product names such as Tianyi and Xuri have faded out and replaced by the unified Idea brand).

Zhenglue Junce partner Fu Zhiyong pointed out that the trend of global brand integration is to strengthen "one brand" and use one main brand to cover all product lines of high, medium and low-end products. For example, Sony insists on a unified logo, and the advantages of a single brand strategy are extremely obvious: it can save a lot of brand creation costs such as advertising and public relations, which is conducive to concentrating limited resources to build a strong brand and enhance the reputation, popularity and recognition of the brand.

Enhancing Brand Relevance

In the process of brand internationalization, a key element in how to build a strong brand is to improve brand relevance. The so-called relevance refers to the degree of association between a brand and customer needs, which includes two points: first, which categories of needs will be mentioned by the brand; So how to increase brand relevance?

“As a high-end brand, simple advertising, promotion and other conventional marketing mixes are not the means to best demonstrate the uniqueness of the brand, but more emphasis should be placed on the monopoly of scarce marketing resources.” The scarce marketing resources mentioned by Fu Zhiyong here It refers to sports marketing or marketing of major events.

Lenovo, the first Chinese company to become a global partner of the International Olympic Committee, sponsored computing technology equipment for the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The same is true of Sony. Last year, Sony cooperated with FIFA to launch 3D live broadcasts of 25 games, which were broadcast in Sony sales experience stores in Beijing and Shanghai. In June this year, they cooperated with Wimbledon to launch 3D live broadcasts of Wimbledon games. In addition to sports marketing, brand experience has also become a killer for companies. From the "Sony Dream Garden" in Beijing Oriental Plaza in 2000 to the second "Sony Dream Garden" on Huaihai Road in Shanghai in 2004, Sony has built a dream kingdom in China step by step. The above model has brought Sony a higher brand awareness and further maintained the loyalty of many Sony followers. At the same time, it has also helped Sony to win over a large number of future consumer customers very early.

Compared with Sony's move, Lenovo has expanded its display channels in terms of brand strategy. For example, in the "Transformers 3" that landed in China in July 2011, the logo of Thinkpad appeared, which also means that the Chinese brand promotion method has been explored from the initial advertising bombing to the cultural marketing level, at the beginning of internationalization. In this stage, some experience in promotion has also been accumulated. However, brand building is a long-term project that requires years of precipitation. Of course, in this era of re-integration of global resources, Chinese companies have opportunities just like Sony was in the 1960s. It is not impossible to take advantage of the curve to overtake and become a great brand. We also expect more Chinese brands to take this opportunity to rise.