PC Battle As Brands Fight For Online Share

A battle is being played out in the PC market with the top four brands fighting to grow share spending up big on online marketing with HP, Dell and Lenovo driving traffic to their own online sites over traditional retailers as consumers move to shop online due to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Lenovo, Dell and HP are benefitting from a significant investment online as they cut out having to pay a margin to retailers they also benefit from not having to pay for marketing on retailer’s web sites.

All brands including Acer are investing in driving customers to online sites as demand for PC sales soar, the big problem for most brands is supply with CE retailers and the specialist dealer channel selling the bulk of stock that they can get their hands on.

Last month the top-5 notebook brands’ combined shipments in August 2020 – not including detachable models – hit a new high for 2020 as shipments to the consumer segment grew year on year. Locally Harvey Norman is picking up share in the fast growing PC gaming market due to demand for Acer’s popular top end Predator gaming machines that are #1 worldwide but not stocked at JB Hi Fi.

Globally Hewlett-Packard (HP) saw its global August shipments return above five million units due to robust demand from the education sectors of Japan and the US.

Although the US placed a trade ban on certain Chinese brands in July, Lenovo’s notebook shipments in August still went up 12% on month due to orders from the education sector.

Dell suffered an on-month shipment decline in August as its orders from the enterprise and consumer segments both slipped from July resulting in the Company moving to slash staff numbers worldwide.

Hewlett Packard

In Australia Hewlett Packard is openly looking to take business away from the likes of JB Hi Fi despite their brand being a top seller in stores and on retailer’s web sites.

Lenovo
Considerable uplift in traffic from August 2019 due to considerable changes to website structures, branded traffic makes up 80.2% of all website traffic According to Sandbox Media, Lenovo has recently adopted dynamic display retargeting within their campaign tactics.

The business that is currently offering major discounts on products is taking advantage of Intel Elements that qualifies them for a shared rebate on advertising expenditure. In addition to this Lenovo are leveraging affiliate-based advertising across display, it’s estimated that they are spending up to $250k per quarter based on information supplied by media organisations.

Dell

The Sandbox Media report reveals that Dell are clearly running dual bid strategies across paid search, Lenovo has the greatest competitive crossover of the comp set analysed in paid search.

All ads are very heavily skewed to commerce and price/discount orientated Keywords.

Acer
The Taiwanese Company is seen as being effective on Facebook. The report claims that Acer is the most effective brand amongst the set for engagement based promoted ads.

Other competitors like Dell and Lenovo are likely spending far heavier amounts within the environment and concentrating this spend on driving leads, traffic, and sales vs community engagement.