Research Outline

HP B2B Competitive Landscape

Goals

To understand the competitive landscape for HP in the B2B space.

Early Findings

  • HP is reportedly using B2C strategies in its B2B marketing. It uses multichannel marketing to reach business customers, utilizing things like influencer marketing and Twitter competitions to showcase themselves.
  • HP uses Publicis Group for the majority of its B2B marketing.
  • Gartner writes that similar companies in the enterprise/B2B space are Dell, NetApp and IBM. However, NetApp only competes with one element of HP's business (cloud services), so we considered an alternative competitor offering the full range of HP's business products, Lenovo.
  • Lenovo's Chief Marketing Officer states it specifically targets CIOs in its marketing messaging. One campaign focused around the "search" for the top 25 ThinkPad laptops "that changed the world".
  • It uses stories to give the brand a more human appeal, focusing on its personality and how this can be connected to current trends in the market.
  • Lenovo also recently used influencer marketing to showcase its (B2B) workstations. They have also stated they are not just looking for impressions, but they want to increase engagement in their social marketing. The video, which contains the 'real customer' story from video game creator Hideo Kojima used in the campaign is here. The video was hosted on YouTube but linked via Twitter.