Development of a Customer Experience-based Brand Strategy for The Lenovo Group to Explore the UK Market

This paper presented a development of a customer experience-based brand strategy for Lenovo Group which is one of the biggest and most powerful PC producers in the world. After acquiring the IBM’s Personal Computing division, Lenovo focus on exploring the UK market. Due to differences in culture, user behaviour, market environment and so on, Lenovo have to develop a new product development brand strategy to transfer their successful brand strategy from China to the UK. The key question in this study is how can Lenovo use customer experience design as a basis for creating an effective brand strategy to fully understand their customer and develop their share in the UK market? This research contributes to the Lenovo brand strategy project. The design research methodology addresses user behaviour and experience analysis, and brand development analysis. The customer analyses data have been collected through questionnaire, interview and observation surveys. From the surveys we find that the UK Personal Computers (PCs) customers are not satisfied with the current PCs purchasing experience and they are looking for better service and experience. Then we adopt Mick Cope and Schmitt’s theoretical framework of customer behaviors analysis and brand development process analysis as an underlying structure. Authors conceptualize their framework more narrowly based on PCs customer experience design, allowing for more specific analysis of details of customer experience during the PCs purchasing process. The PCs purchasing process was then divided into three stages: the pre-sales thinking, the purchasing process and the after-sales service. The analysis led to the integration of the key factors related to the UK PCs market environment, customer behaviors, and brand development process. The study established a new brand strategy which has been evaluated and will be implemented in the company’s brand strategy. Introduction Nowadays, Personal Computers (PCs) have been infiltrated into our daily lives and are increasingly functional in meeting various aspects of our professional and personal needs. Undoubtedly, it will become a part of almost all our lives in the future and for many it has already become an indispensable item. This trend means the PCs industry is facing the question to how to sustain growth in the business environment. Research data from IDC indicates over 10% growth registered in PCs sales globally in 2004, with no obvious signs of growth slowdown in the next few years. In China, this growth is even faster compared to the global figures and brand internationalization has become an inevitable trend for Chinese PCs producers. Lenovo is the best example of internationalization.