LENOVO: Understanding Customers and Building Profitable Relationships

The global success of Lenovo is rooted in its deep and sound understanding of customers and its ability to build
profitable relationships. The business model is thus built on customer satisfaction, innovation, and operational
efficiency.

Lenovo was established in Beijing, China, in 1984 by 11 members of the Computer Technology Research
Institute. Originally founded as Legend by Liu Chunzhi with a group of 10 engineers, the company
decided to abandon the brand name in 2002 to expand internationally, and so its name was changed to
Lenovo. In 2005, the company acquired IBM’s personal computer business, including the ThinkPad
laptop and tablet lines. This acquisition accelerated access to foreign markets and made Lenovo the third-
largest computer maker worldwide by volume. In 2015, Lenovo was the world’s largest personal
computer vendor by unit sales and had operations in more than 60 countries, with products sold in around
160 countries.

The global success of Lenovo is rooted in its deep and sound understanding of customers and its ability to
build profitable relationships. The business model is thus built on customer satisfaction, innovation, and
operational efficiency. Lenovo’s marketers spend a great deal of time thinking about customers and their
buying behavior. They want to know who their customers are. What do they think? How do they feel
about the products? What makes them tick? In order to arrive at comprehensive answers to these
questions, Lenovo’s product design and engineering teams listen to their customers through their social
media channels, forums, blogs, and fan clubs around the world.

The company highly values the input of its customers and tracks it accordingly. For example, after
Lenovo had introduced new variants of its Lenovo ThinkPad series in 2012 and 2013, customers
complained on internet forums that the two physical TrackPoint buttons had been removed from the
touchpad at the bottom of the keyboard. These buttons correspond to the left and right mouse buttons on a
conventional mouse and work as a substitute to an external mouse or touchpad. Always with an ear to the
ground, Lenovo soon realized this issue and publically admitted that they had made a big mistake. Soon
afterwards, they brought back the TrackPoint buttons.

Lenovo’s product development is always driven by deep customer understanding from around the globe.
The company emphasizes on its websites that every time customers provide feedback in some form, they
are actually and personally helping to influence the next wave of technology that it puts into the market.
By listening and communicating constantly with their customers and taking into consideration their input
when it comes to product development and improvement, Lenovo has been successful in building
emotional relationships with their customers. They engage more directly with customers when they
display traits such as honesty in admitting mistakes, as in case of the ThinkPad redesign. In this respect,
Tracey Trachta, vice president of Brand Experience at Lenovo, states that the company aims to not just
display its products on shelves, but through engagement to also enable people to understand what it is that
makes Lenovo’s products different. Through the years, Lenovo’s emphasis on building emotional
relationships with their customers has given them a more personal cast than a mere computer
manufacturer.

In addition to listening to their customers, Lenovo also filters and focuses their analytic efforts on better
understanding the online behavior of site visitors. Concentrating on two of their main user segments,
purchasers and non-purchasers, Lenovo constantly aims to better understand their online buying behavior
on the homepage and product pages specifically. Learning the differences between them enables Lenovo
to develop and deliver the right message to the right users, ultimately converting non-purchasing users
into purchasers. In order to achieve this objective, Lenovo permanently visualizes the in-page behavior of
each customer segment via so-called heat maps, which provide deep insights into users’ digital
psychology.

In a recent study, Lenovo identified an interesting difference between purchasers and non-purchasers.
One finding was that purchasers were drawn to the main homepage banner and deals, whereas non-
purchasers avoided the banner and were less focused on their search, favoring product images and videos
over text. As non-purchasers dominate a significant percentage of the Lenovo website user base, better
understanding their customer experience was crucial towards improving it and increasing conversion
rates. Drawing from the study, the company has used greater ratios of images and videos to text in order
to guide those potential customers and engage with them to a greater extent.

Understanding what’s most important to the customer is paramount for Lenovo because the company
continuously focuses on exceeding customer expectations and creating customer delight. For example,
when the company noticed that many of the discussions about PCs, tablets, and other electronic devices
were happening on blogs and third-party discussion forums, they spent a lot of time trying to understand
the existing conversations and participating in discussions. Lenovo then decided that it wanted more
ownership, even better customer understanding, and stronger leadership in the discussions about its
products. Accordingly, Lenovo set up its own discussion forums and actively asked customers to share
their ideas, user experience, and tips with Lenovo’s product, design, and development teams. By doing so,
Lenovo was able to better connect with its customers and provide even better customer service.

In all, Lenovo possesses a unique ability to achieve customer satisfaction and engagement. The company
has positively shaped and influenced customers’ perceptions of Lenovo’s brand personality by trying to
listen to and understand them. Consumers today—conditioned by mobile and powered by the Internet—
need brands that can interact with them in real time. Lenovo engages in a consistent, respectful, two-way
dialogue with their target audience. As a result, various satisfaction studies consistently place the
company well ahead of its competitors in various satisfaction studies. Technology Business Research
(TBR), for example, has declared Lenovo the best computer brand in its extensive Corporate IT Buying
Behavior and Customer Satisfaction studies. Giving top marks in important categories of customer
satisfaction and innovation, the analysis found Lenovo’s customer service and cutting-edge features
second to none.