What does HP want to ask us today?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 10 December 2007 07:34

Opinion and Analysis

HP has launched a new marketing campaign called “What do you have to say?”, making shades of Microsoft’s “Where do you want to go today?” ad campaign bounce around my brain.
If there’s one part of HP that is a true license to print money, it’s HP’s ‘Imaging & Printing Group’, responsible for scanners, printers, ink and toner for consumers, businesses and government, and in a constant battle for supremacy against Canon, Epson, Lexmark, Brother, Ricoh, Kyocera, Xerox, Kodak and others in various market segments.

To make sure that HP firmly stays in the minds of buyers, HP have launched a ‘globally integrated’ US $300m marketing campaign, and have decided to call it “What do you have to say?" , leaving off the ‘today’ Microsoft asked in their similarly worded question of several years ago now.

In another nod to Internet marketing nomenclature is the fact HP’s printing and imaging strategy is called ‘HP Print 2.0’, which HP says is focused on three areas: “delivering a next-generation digital printing platform that increases print speeds and lowers the cost of printing; making it easier to print from the Web; and extending HP’s digital content creation and publishing platforms across all customer segments”.

Well, all of that sounds good, and in a world where competitors such as Kodak are competing on ink pricing that delivers, according to Kodak, twice the amount of prints for the same amount of money, a company like HP needs to introduce ‘unique value propositions’ that will appeal to consumers and get them to buy HP’s products over those from other companies.

Christoph Schell, Vice President and General Manager, Imaging and Printing Group, HP South Pacific, makes this clear when he says that: “HP’s Print 2.0 vision aims to leverage the power of the Web as a gateway for our customers to communicate, collaborate and publish their content in ways they could not before.  The ‘What do you have to say?’ campaign embodies this vision”.

Of course, whether or not the campaign will succeed in this regard is yet to be seen, with issues such as the cost of ink and printing, and whether or not to print photos on the home printer, get an online service to print them or print them in a store, probably more front of mind issues for consumers than any ability to collaborate or publish content.

That said, online photo sharing services have proved very popular with online users, and any campaign that gets people to be more digitally creative with their computers, cameras, scanners and printers is good for the computing industry at large, benefitting all parts of the retail chain.

Even HP’s competitors should benefit from HP’s global marketing efforts as consumers decide to do more collaboration, communication and sharing with whatever equipment they already use, whatever websites they visit and whatever community they are already part of, if they don’t decide to upgrade to an HP and use HP’s services the next time they decide to buy new printing and imaging equipment.

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