Building the brand at HP: HP ties the brand together

WARC, 7 March 2014

NEW YORK: Hewlett-Packard, the information technology giant, has enhanced the quality and impact of its marketing by focusing on "mega-campaigns".

Marty Homlish, the firm's chief customer experience officer, told delegates at BRITE '14 – an event held by the Center on Global Brand Leadership, part of Columbia Business School – that it now has 17 core campaigns.

Such a situation marks a massive reduction on the thousands of separate, smaller platforms it was previously running, which were rarely united by a common theme. (For more, including how HP developed its "Make it matter" positioning, read Warc's exclusive report: HP learns to "Make it matter".)

"There was not just one HP; there were thousands and thousands of HPs," said Homlish, who was previously the company's chief marketing officer.

A contributor to HP's troubles in this area was that it had completed 70 acquisitions in 15 years, greatly diversifying its portfolio, posing a challenge in terms of integration.

"What our brand ultimately turned into was a cacophony of noise," he continued. "We had to tie the brand together."

A wider drive for simplification in its positioning – beginning in 2011 – had shaped the organisation's strategy in this space. It also formed part of the broader transformation agenda being pursued by Meg Whitman, who was named as Hewlett-Packard's chief executive in September of the same year.

Taking a more holistic approach across the organisation's five major business units has been a key component of this process – and has helped determine the criteria for selecting specific marketing programmes, too.

Homlish added: "The requirement to be funded was it had to cut across at least three business units. If it didn't cut across three business units and you couldn't tell an end-to-end story, you didn't get any money."

Data sourced from Warc

For more on theory and case studies on: http://expertresearchers.blogspot.com