The Lenovo Internet cafe in the Olympic Village seems a marketer's dream. The Lenovo name is splashed on the wall and each of the 34 workstations where athletes and trainers from Australia to Sweden tap out e-mails to friends and family.
Yet the users have little idea about the sponsor.
"No, no clue. Maybe it's an Internet provider?" said Andy Huppi, a massage therapist for the Canadian men's ice hockey team. "They let us in, and we use the computers."
PHOTO: AP
Athletes aren't the only ones hoping the Olympics bring them worldwide fame.
Lenovo Group Ltd (
"We're using the Torino Games to establish ourselves as a global player," said Deepak Advani, Lenovo's chief marketing officer.
Lenovo is launching an ad campaign with three 30-second spots to air on NBC, the network showing the Winter Games in the US. It has endorsement deals with 11 Olympic athletes from Europe, China and the US. And NBC's Olympics crew is leasing 1,000 Lenovo notebook and desktop computers, giving Lenovo more chances for getting its brand on TV.
Marketing blitz
The blitz is Lenovo's biggest marketing foray since it made headlines 15 months ago with the US$1.75 billion purchase of IBM's PC operation. The acquisition is China's largest to date of a US business and a bold move for a company founded 22 years ago as a commercial offshoot of a staid government research institute.
In a sign of its global ambitions, Lenovo moved its headquarters from Beijing to the New York City suburb of Purchase last year.
The adjustment has not been wholly smooth. Cultural barriers between the Chinese employees and IBM holdovers, different work styles and a 12-hour time difference between Beijing and New York have complicated integration, employees say.
"In the past we could leave the office at six o'clock. Now we have dinner, and by seven the conference calls start coming," said Alice Li, the Beijing-based head of marketing and communications. "More and more we're figuring out how to adapt and change to being an international company."
While Lenovo continues to boom in China, its share of the global market dipped slightly last year, to 7.2 percent, and shipments have failed to keep pace with gains by market leaders Dell Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co, according to IDC, a firm that tracks info-tech industry trends.
Lenovo has won some positive reviews for updating the style and technology of IBM's well-regarded ThinkPad notebook computer. New product launches are planned, including a data-backup system to guard against viruses, Advani said.
Still, "they can't expect to turn it around 180 degrees overnight," said Bryan Ma, a Singapore-based technology analyst with IDC. "There's still a lot more education that needs to be done with that brand name."
As China's first and only global sponsor of the Olympics, Lenovo is joining such well-known brands as Coca-Cola and McDonalds and is trying to follow the Olympic marketing path blazed by other well-known Asian brands such as Panasonic and Samsung.
Lenovo and the International Olympic Committee refuse to disclose how much the company's sponsorship cost, but analysts estimate it paid US$80 million to US$100 million in cash and services for the three-year cycle that covers the Turin competition and the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.
Olympic logo
The deal gives Lenovo the right to affix the Olympic logo of five interlocking rings on products and advertising worldwide. In return, Lenovo provided thousands of servers, computers and monitors for the Turin venues and other facilities. It set up seven Internet cafes like the one in the Olympic Village and has had about 100 engineers on site, some of them living in Turin for nearly two years.
"The work surrounding the Olympics catapults us into a working relationship that would have taken much longer to develop under normal circumstances," said Al Dell'Aglio, a 61-year-old IBM veteran based in Purchase who worked with a 33-year-old Chinese MBA from Beijing in setting up the seven Internet lounges. "We were thrown into it and had to make it work."
Lenovo has gotten high marks for the quality of its products and its engineers from the Turin organizing committee.
"Lenovo has demonstrated to be a reliable and pro-active partner in every phase of the project," said Stefano Sandri, IT director for the organizing committee who had 75 Lenovo technicians working for him in preparing for the Games.
At first, he added, "language was a barrier, though they speak English. Now they're speaking some Italian."
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