How Lenovo positioned itself as a quality Chinese brand

So, Lenovo has since long become a multinational company. Now, as with many Chinese
companies, its challenge is to become an international brand.

And for Lenovo this means not being Chinese, as much as possible. Brion Tingler, Lenovo’s
director of global media relations says “We don’t go anywhere with the idea that we are a
Chinese company, but more that we are a global company,”

So it is clear that Lenovo doesn’t like to think of itself as a Chinese company, and so it strives
to avoid appearing like one. And this policy is visible in their marketing. ( in fact sir before I
worked on this project I personally did not know Lenovo was a Chinese brand) now as the
company has tried to become recognized as a brand on a global scale, it endeavors to make it
difficult to say where it’s come from.

Plus “When you look at the management team, out of the top 10 people at the company,
including the CEO, there are six different nationalities, they refer to it as the global-local
model. As a result in different places around the world, the people that run the markets, are
from those markets. So Brazilians run Brazil, Europeans run Europe, and Indians run India.”

Nor is Lenovo’s leadership based largely in China. Listed in Hong Kong, the company has
top executives not only in that location and Beijing but also in Singapore, Tokyo and
California’s Silicon Valley.

The result is that there’s very little to identify Lenovo as a Chinese company. And though a
pioneer, Lenovo is not alone in this: The construction of its brand and its obscuring of its
Chinese origins sheds light on the practices and challenges of many Chinese companies now
looking for name recognition that is equal to their businesses success.

“By saying that they are a global company, [Lenovo] says they are as good as anybody else,
not only just as good as anybody else in China,” says James Roy of the China Market
Research Group in Shanghai. This is smart on Lenovo’s part, since Chinese brands still do
not have a lot of prestige internationally, or even within China. “Chinese consumers want to
feel they are buying the best there is to offer in the world,” says Tingler, which means they
tend to prefer foreign brands to Chinese brands. In fact, in several parts of China, Lenovo
markets itself as a global brand, or at least not as a Chinese brand.

This fact is also evident when you look at Lenovo’s offices, while it is headquarted in
Beijing, China, its website and news articles usually depict it as an American corporate with
its central hub at North Carolina, USA.

Lenovo acquired Motorola in spite of the latter’s losses of about $380 million (U.S.) in the
fourth quarter of 2013. In part, the deal was made with an eye on Motorola’s patents books.
Lenovo was then able to use the company’s 8,000 U.S. patents and 15,000 foreign ones on a
permanent, royalty-free basis. But beyond the cellphones and patents, the acquisition reflects
Lenovo’s larger strategy of buying up foreign names to grow its international presence faster.
After the acquisition of IBM’s ThinkPad in 2005, Lenovo acquired German consumer
electronics company Medion in 2011 and Brazilian electronics giant CCE in 2013, among
others.

This is a common practice among Chinese firms. Acquisitions of foreign firms by Chinese
companies, flush with cash from their operations in China, have multiplied recently.

“A lot of [Chinese] companies are using [acquisitions] as a way of learning about how
international branding goes on,” says James Roy. “Acquisition gives you immediate
recognition, and you can learn how it all works as you go, the way Lenovo has.”

Lenovo and ThinkPad are a case in point, For the first several years internationally, they still
had the IBM name on the ThinkPad, even though it wasn’t part of IBM anymore. And then,
bit by bit, you saw them coming to it, and now it’s all Lenovo ThinkPad.

One of the reasons Chinese companies find it necessary to rely on established brands is their
lack of experience in branding. Because of the size of the Chinese market, Chinese
companies have gone after domestic consumers for many years before going international.
Many have gotten very big in China and haven’t had to rely on overseas growth, where there
was more intense competition, less growth, less awareness of your brand.

Several of these Chinese multinationals often started as anonymous factories subcontracted as

suppliers to larger companies, before launching their own brand later. Because these
companies began as manufacturers, they knew much more about products than branding.
Thus their lack of a strong branding strategy today.

So to say if Chinese brands like Lenovo do in fact get large international recognition, they
will begin to be seen as more Chinese. “As consumers in other markets get familiar with the
brands and products, they take on a lot of associations applied with that country, as a result
even though Lenovo may well become a household name in the future, the question is
whether people will know that it’s a Chinese one.