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Dell wants to be hip. If nothing else, the company's new plan to invest a whopping $4.5 billion dollars over the next three years in a new worldwide marketing and advertising blitz makes that abundantly clear. In what's looking more and more like a very serious attempt to mirror the success of Hewlett-Packard's "the computer is personal again" ad campaign -- as well as undo the persist drab corporate connotations that have long plagued its brand -- Dell announced it has enlisted the help of British ad agency WPP. The two will pool their resources to create an elite marketing group called "Project Da Vinci," which will be made up of both WPP and Dell employees.
According to the world's number two PC vendor, Da Vinci will control all of Dell's advertising, communications and marketing efforts, as well as manage relationships with other sub-contracting agencies worldwide.
The news is certainly significant in light of the continued market share beat down Dell has taken from rival HP, not to mention its recent realization that brand and good design actually matter in the PC industry. Indeed, while Apple and HP have both benefited from a unified approach to marketing and focusing (to a large extent) on brand, Dell is still largely remembered for the 'Dell Dude' -- a campaign that dates all the way back to 2000. As the dollar amount associated with the new marketing contract suggests, the company would like that to change.
"Like many other companies in the industry, Dell grew large with a dispersed media face," says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies.
Kay says that approach is quickly falling out of favor in today's competitive PC market where large and decentralized companies are growing more interested in conveying a unified cohesive message rather than managing various different campaigns across the globe.
Photo: Flickr/Photo-Mojo
"I do think HP set the pace [for Dell] and Apple of course has been doing this for years with their ad campaigns," Kay says. "Yes, you still need some localization…but you also want to make sure your message gets through and that [the campaigns] don't conflict each other. In order to do that, OEMs are opting for a single agency to oversee everything they do and it's working."
Take HP, for example. In June of 2006, the company launched a global marketing campaign with the tagline "The computer is Personal Again." Those commercials were conceived by Apple's former marketing chief Satjiv Chahil and advertising bigwig David Roman, and were an effort to inject brand back into what had largely been a boring commodity overrun with technical details.
By making good use of celebrities and focusing on marketing basics, the campaign worked wonders for HP and continues to b.
Ultimately, the challenge for Dell will be to translate any success it has with these commercial ad campaigns to its corporate products as well, Kay says. The company may well be interested in shedding its stodgy corporate imagine for one that's more hip and focused on digital media, but it doesn't want to do that at the cost of corporate sales -- still its bread and butter. To date, HP hasn't had a problem doing this, and if Project Da Vinci can figure out a similar formula for success, we could start to see some significant shifts in market shares in the years ahead.
