Dell takes the SME path

In October last year, personal computer manufacturer Dell’s market share in the small and medium enterprises (SME) segment was just 3.2 per cent. A year later, the figure has improved to 5.2 per cent – a creditable performance considering that PC sales have been south-bound in this period.

Dell says the credit goes to its campaign -- ‘Take Your Own Path’ -- launched in October, 2008. It was the first such campaign by Dell anywhere in the world as the company mainly relied on direct marketing earlier.

Dell has been a well-entrenched player in the big enterprise and the individual consumer space, but had limited recall value in the fast growing SME segment. “Enterprise clients plan at least six to eight months in advance for their IT requirements, but selling to SMEs was a challenge as they usually follow an unstructured buying pattern,” says P Krishnakumar, SMB Product Marketing for Dell Asia-Pacific Japan (APJ).

That meant Dell would have to shorten the time for its products to hit the market. It also meant that the PC-manufacturer would need to get into distribution either on its own or with partners. Krishnakumar says the company puts its sales structure and channel partnerships in place before launching the campaign.

While the campaign was conceived during the boom years of 2007 and 2008, the launch date coincided with the economic slowdown. But the company decided to go ahead.

The results of the campaign were evident in the first two quarters after the launch. In an internal study, the company found the acceptability increasing to 16 points. More importantly, the purchase intent, which was below 10 points in the third quarter of 2008, went up to 21 points in the first quarter of 2009.

Unlike a lot of other IT product campaigns, the ‘Take Your Own Path’ campaign stayed away from using Bollywood themes and spoke about the success story of Indian entrepreneurs. The campaign roped in people like Raman Roy, Founder and CEO of Quatrro BPO, P Rajendran, Co-founder and CEO of NIIT, Neeraj Roy of Hungama, Kishore P of Everron Systems among others.

“Deciding on the brand ambassadors was a bit difficult as we did not want to get into the Bollywood celebrity space. Most of the players in the industry were talking about Bollywood heroes, but our focus was to bring out the success of entrepreneurs in India. So we chose from the database of customers we had in India,” Krishnakumar says.

That Dell is thrilled with the success of its India campaign is evident from teh fact that the company took it to one more country – France, in March this year. The campaign has since been launched in Japan, Germany, the UK, the US and China.