Quick. Are you an 18-year-old, Pink Floyd-loving, pizza-gorging, pub-going teenager, who doesn?t like hobnobbing with the hoi polloi, yet can pour his heart out to strangers on Orkut?
If yes, the Lenovo and Disney Consumer Products has a desktop that could be just for you?the Lenovo 3000 H ?Power Rangers Mystic Force? series. This limited edition PC comes embossed with superhero characters. The 3M graphic and red skin, forming a wrinkle-free casing around the PC is impossible to miss.
However, if your monthly allowance doesn?t permit all that, you could opt for the HCL Pride (Intel, 1.33 Ghz, RedHat Linux with Open Office package, 40 GB HDD, 256 MB RAM, an optical scroll mouse, multimedia keyboard, 15-inch CRT colour monitor and one-year warranty) tagged at Rs 10,990 that comes with an Airtel broadband connection and a two-year subscription to mysmartschool.com, among other things.
Aren?t you glad your computer?to borrow a phrase from Hewlett Packard?has become personal again? Incidentally, HP?s aggressive global 360-degree marketing campaign touting this question focuses on India as one of its primary markets.
And why not? An IDC report reveals that growing at 22.4% in 2006 (the growth for the IT market in India in 2007 is projected at 21.5%), India is still the fastest growing IT market in the entire Asia-Pacific region.
A similar forecast is made in the IT Industry Performance Annual Review: 2006-07 by the Manufacturers Association for Information Technology (MAIT). It puts the total PC (desktop and notebook) market in India at 6,341,451 units in 2006-07, up 19% over 2005-06, when the figure stood at 5,046,558. (The market in the north grew by 59%, east by 53%, west by 5% and south, incidentally, the only exception, declined by 12%).
This report also reveals that overall household consumption during this period?of which students comprise a major chunk?grew by almost 23% (SEC B grew by 52% and SEC C by 50%), indicating that the IT market could finally be shifting to smaller cities.
Notebook sales, interestingly, account for almost 13% of the total PC market (in 2006-07), up from 9% in 2005-06.
This also indicates the market?s shift to a premium product line as P-4 (Intel Pentium 4 ) sales kept dominating the market with an 80% marketshare.
In keeping with these trends, the consumption of Indian brands decreased 2%, while the sales of MNC brands grew by 33% against 22% for assembled PCs, according to the MAIT survey.
No wonder vendors in India are now targeting a wider canvas, across customer segments, through innovation, customisation, price reductions, free insurance and soft loan schemes. Indeed, PC makers such as HCL, HP and Lenovo have come out with product features specifically targeted at the student community, combined with clever notebook promotions at universities and smaller towns.
This is undoubtedly getting reflected in their market communication. HP?s ?Personal Again? global campaign conceived last year was quickly followed with ?Business is Personal Again? targeted at the enterprise and the small- and medium-business (SMB) owners.
Claiming 41% marketshare in the notebook and 14% in consumer desktops, HP rolled out its ?Hall of Fame? campaign featuring Karan Johar, Dilip and Hafeez Contractor, mainly to harp on this ?personal? element of their machine.
Meanwhile, market leader, the Rs 11,855-crore HCL Infosystems (17% marketshare in desktop and notebook) has rolled out a bevy of beauties at every price point, almost matching the width of consumer profiles in the country.
Believe it or not, HCL Leaptops series (?Not just laptops, leaptops?) has customised features for consumer segments as diverse as insurance agents, doctors and homemakers. The Leaptops version for women, for instance, comes in an attractive silver casing and free subscription of a few women?s lifestyle periodicals, among other things.
?We have a product for everybody?be he a CEO in upmarket Mumbai, owning India?s only MoDT (mobile on desktop)?the HCL Beanstalk Nano?or a pre-teenager whose favorite pastime is gaming on the HCL Dominator, or a tailor in Banswara (Rajasthan) who dreams of preparing his only daughter for the ICS with the help of the HCL Ezeebee,? declares Rajendra Kumar, vice-president (consumer division) HCL Infosystems.
This series also has features specially targeted at architects (??that make for better building blocks when it comes to realising a vision?), lawyers (?Their case for convincing arguments?), insurance agents (?especially built to provide state-of-art service to insurance customers?), higher education-seeking students (?? to help students compete in the global arena), doctors (?especially created to make the lives of those who save lives easier?) and armed force personnel (?with especially created technology that makes them usable even in the toughest conditions?).
For school students, the company has what is called a classmate PC?pocket-size, mobile learning assistant designed for second to ninth graders?with in-built wireless and digital pen attachments that can run both Microsoft Windows or Mandriva/Metasys Linux operating systems.
About this new series, Kumar says, ?We see tremendous growth in mobile computing. It will take over fixed computing by the turn of this decade.? HCL, incidentally, has been in the personal computing space since 1995, when it launched the signature Beanstalk. This was followed with extensions?HCL Beanstalk Nano, HCL Beanstalk Lyfe and HCL Dominatore Gaming PCs and finally, the Skins that can be pasted on the Leaptop cover for personalised style and ownership.
HP quickly answered with its own range of HP Cool Skinz, along with a total care programme rounding off the effort with the TouchSmart range (?Irresistible OOMPH?), which is 20-inch-screen entertainment notebook, The Dragon, and the HP iPAQ 512, which comes with a voice messenger. HP, incidentally, leads in the portable notebook segment (marketshare of 39.6% in 2007).
Meanwhile, HP?s Compaq brand also underwent a remarkable change to make it ?more stylish and contemporary,? in the words of Deepti Dang, head of marketing (personal systems group, commercial), HP India.
?If you look around,? says Dang, ?everyone?s desktop has either the image of a favorite holiday destination or a family photo as a screensaver. That?s how personal it is. I really would not know what to do if my laptop crashes today. We have all our strategy, plans, thousand of e-mails stored in it, irrespective of whether it’s a laptop or a desktop.?
You could also look for evidence of this kind of personalisation in Lenovo?s facial recognition features in the 3000 Y Series (Y300 and Y500). The television commercial for this series has Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan spoofing on Cast Away, marooned on an island, with nobody recognising him when he returns home, until he stands before his Lenovo Y-Series laptop and gets logged in!
Lenovo also scores in terms of multimedia feature bundling. ?Greater technology awareness, Internet penetration and growing convergence of multimedia devices (TVs, music players and PCs) led us to devise these features,? says Rahul Agarwal, vice-president (marketing), Lenovo India, who cites the example of some DTH players, who are now beaming satellite TV direct to your PC and a few other carriers, who are rolling out IPTV. In other words, your PC can be what you want it to be.
?Our aim, ultimately is to have products at every price point, for every customer segment,? declares Agarwal. The Lenovo 3000 range, for instance comes with an advanced Dolby Home Theatre and a Shuttle Centre for easy flip between various formats, a music DJ and an integrated TV for an enhanced digital picture and sound quality. The Lenovo 3000 Q consumer desktop also features a Jog Dial for swapping programmes with the mere turn of a dial. And, lastly, the Lenovo 3000 Y410 notebook launched recently comes with an Audio DJ capability with which you can play music even while the laptop is turned off.
That the Indian consumer is ready for such works is indicated in the growth of the consumer segment in the PC market. Between 2001 and 2007, the MAIT survey indicates, the annual growth in homes stood at 23%, while in the business segment it stood at 18%.
The buzz in the market just got louder.
