So it’s not entirely surprising that pricing models don’t have anything to say about “it." And it’s not surprising that senior managers boot this sort of decision with some frequency. You just get product on the shelf.” (If only they had a Chief Culture Officer.) “Oh, listen, don’t bother your pretty little heads about it,” they said to the client. When asked to measure and account for “it,” and every cultural moments has it’s its (it girls, it brands, it activities, it restaurants, it industries), designers and agency people demurred. The fault lies largely on the side of the design house and the ad agency. But if we are not protecting “it” when our designers and engineers gift us with it, if we are not building the brand that protects us from the commodity basement, our decision, rational by some narrow standard, is wildly irrational by any broader one.Ĭommerce isn’t good at imponderables. Lenovo’s “it extraction” was a good, rational, pricing decision. Having taken on a brand that would help it fight its way out of the commodity basement, it has now descended into that commodity basement, slamming the door behind it as it goes. Sadder still, it destroyed much of the brand value that prompted Lenovo to buy ThinkPad from IBM in the first place. When Lenovo took the “it” out of ThinkPad, it gave up the only branding advantage it had over Apple. This was a perfectly sensible marketing decision.īut it was of course an absolutely disastrous business decision, one that may cost Lenovo dearly. It may well have been working from Robert Dolan’s exemplary text book on the topic. It was making a rational business decision. So why did Lenovo perform an “it” extraction? That’s clear enough. It doesn’t have “it.” Until last week, that belonged to ThinkPad. The Apple entry in this category, the MacBook Air, is a pretty good machine. We may not be able to measure “it,” but we don’t hesitate to pay the premium it demands of us.Īpple turns out to be pretty good at “it.” In fact, Apple now pretty much owns “it” in the computer world at the moment.Įxcept when it come to the lightest, full function lap top.
All of us can buy a phone that is smarter, faster and cheaper than the iPhone. This would be a mere irritation if “it” weren’t such a gusher in the tech world. But when it comes to anatomizing, measuring, and pricing “it,” well, this proves difficult and all the marketing and pricing models break down. We can point to “it.” We know “it” when we see it. It’s a difficult discussion because “it” is inscrutable. This takes us into one of the thorniest issue in the branding world. The T410 is just another business machine. No claim to being the pick of the technological litter. It is a business machine in the most pedestrian sense of the term. The trouble: the T400 doesn’t have “it” quality. When called upon to explain himself, Lenovo Marketing Director, Wang Lipin said that T400 series was more powerful than the x301, and cheaper by a thousand dollars. Lenovo is proposing the ThinkPad T410s as the x301s replacement. It is a miraculous demonstration of what design and engineer can do.Īnd now it’s done for. It has that wonderful ThinkPad keyboard, a huge screen, and it weighs only a little bit more than a ballet slipper. Last week, quietly and without fanfare, ThinkPad decided not to renew its flagship model, the X301.
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