Lenovo’s new focus

Las Vegas, Nevada—We’ve been working closely with Lenovo for the past few months—we’ve put the spotlight on Moto’s comeback in the Philippines and, more recently, a deeper look into the first-ever Google Tango device, the Phab 2 Pro.

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While we’ve seen more from the company’s smartphone business lately, most of you would know that isn’t all Lenovo has to offer to the market. Our recent trip with them to CES 2017 in Las Vegas gave us a chance to see the wide array of products the Chinese multinational company is offering.

During that trip, we were fortunate enough to sit down with Ken Wong, president for Asia Pacific and senior vice president for the Lenovo Group, as well as David Roman, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of the company. In separate interviews, we were able to understand more about Lenovo as a brand and a business.

Dare to be different

Ken Wong, president for Asia Pacific and senior vice president for the Lenovo GroupIf you’ve been paying close attention to the tech industry for the past couple of years, you’ll notice the subtle changes Lenovo has been doing to its brand. The new logo gives a more relaxed, approachable vibe to the company. These changes, as Wong and Roman narrated to us, are part of Lenovo’s plan to meet the needs of its customers. “To innovate or perish,” seems to be the underlying message.

“Being the best is not enough because this second you are the best, the next second other people will become better than you and they become the best,” Wong says. “The only way to [be] sustainable, to continue to greatness, is if you continue to innovate, continue to be different, and continue to be better.”

And Lenovo believes that in order to be better you need to be different. You’ll see that a lot in the marketing initiatives of the brand this 2017 and perhaps beyond. Its new tagline, “Different is better,” pushes the brand into a different focus.

The customer is at the heart of what Lenovo is trying to do. “We want to be relevant to the user, so it’s not just [about] our technology,” Roman says.

He adds, “We’re saying, ‘It’s better for you, because you are interested in this, and this is what it does.’ So we always try and tie it to the user… Obviously, we’re proud of our technologies and our features but we look at it from a perspective of what are the people going to do with that? In that sense, we look at what is going to make that experience better.”

Roman understands it’s not all about having the best and coolest stuff—especially if it isn’t in “context,” as he puts it. Because at that point, the best might not be enough. And he admits this is why they are streamlining products.

“We’ve been so focused on the product, on the features of the product, and we’ve sort of tend to be less focused on what do we stand for, what do we represent, what do users associate with us? We want to balance out those two things,” Roman expounds. “Still, we’re a technology company, we’re still focused on having the coolest features, the coolest new things. But we want to do it in a context. It’s not just marketing, it’s industrial design. It’s the packaging. It’s the user experience, the user interface. It’s what happens when you turn on the screen. It’s how we support it. It’s the community of users that we create around it.”

Working it out

It doesn’t mean the company plans to drop any of its current line of products. Roman alludes to a more focused approach to each segment. What we saw at CES is evidence of that.

The new ThinkPads are designed to better the lives of the enterprise segment, Legion caters to the specific needs of gamers, and the Lenovo and Moto phones address the mobile requirements. Plus, Lenovo’s looking to make a dent in the virtual reality and smart home spaces with a few new products there.

But it isn’t all organized yet. The company’s diverse portfolio still looks like there are some unnecessary overlaps. If you ask us for an example, we see the Miix line of convertible tablet/PCs as being a redundant segment. Perhaps, its technologies will eventually get absorbed into another line. But we can’t say. It does prove, though, that there’s still work to be done.

In the mobile space as well, Wong admits the company is still in transition. According to him, Lenovo is working on making the Moto line the “master brand” for the company’s phone business.

All for the customer

Being in all of these segments and working to create innovative products, Wong says it boils down to Lenovo’s push to understand and be there for its customers.

“Technology is an inevitable product for everyone,” he says. “You cannot live without technology… because of that you need technology whenever you are at home, on the road, or in the office. And you cannot find one device that will fit everything so you got to have different devices to fulfill different requirements under different usage models.”

Roman echoes Wong’s sentiment on this topic: “We’ve restructured a lot of things; we’re trying to make the company much more agile. Supply chain is crucial. Speed and agility is it, and that comes from being focused on your customers. Because in the end, everything changes. But if you have to pick one thing, pick what the customers are doing, because then you’ll look at everything else from that perspective and you’ll make the right choices. Otherwise, you can go the direction you think is cool but no one else does, and you’re out.”

If Lenovo maintains that “customer first” mindset, it’s going to be an exciting time ahead for the company. We asked Wong what we should expect from Lenovo in the future and he managed to pique our curiosity further.

“I would say, anything that will help Lenovo to grow, we are actively looking at that,” Wong shares. “The key thing is coming out from the idea that I shared with you: that customers’s expectation of technology is very different from five years ago. They meet technology in every part of their business. I hope you won’t be surprised if we’re coming out with something different from smart home assistants but it won’t be too far away from the themes that I just talked about. Whatever you need in terms of technology to help you to live better in your life, I think Lenovo would be interested. And you should expect that will be coming out from Lenovo.”