Global Summit of Women 2004
Seoul, Korea

TAN Lee Chew
Vice President, Business and Enterprise
HP Imaging and Printing Group, Asia Pacific & Japan

 I want to thank Global Summit of Women for inviting me and giving me this privileged opportunity to share with you today, especially when there are so many of you here in the audience who could tell compelling personal stories about your own journeys and your own experiences and accomplishments.

Web Marketing

With the tight squeeze in marketing and advertising budget under the current economic climate, the question that is often asked is how do we get the biggest bang for our buck?  Or in economic terms, how do we get the best Return on Investment? Many see the web as a necessary overhead, and there are yet others who see the web as a competitive asset. At HP, we like to think of it as the fault line between winning and losing in the marketplace.

The internet is one of our key conduits and touch point to our consumer and business customers. We have more than 100 million consumer customers today. Our online HP store complements the 110,000 retail outlets we have in 176 countries. Each month, we touch 45 million consumers. Having an innovative way to stay in touch with these customers becomes highly critical to our success.

Indeed, the web technology is an enabler to accelerate business success for us in HP.

 Transforming business

In the past five years, e-business and e-commerce have been little more than simply automated extensions of traditional processes. With the onslaught of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and 3G technology, the internet is increasingly accessible to consumers any time, any where. Web marketing is at its inflection point where it can truly be a catalyst to transform how business is done.

Our strategy for web marketing focuses on five core areas:

·         Establishing market leadership – build customer awareness of company strategy and solutions through a customer-centric approach

·         Driving sales – here we would like to take online sales beyond a mere transaction but rather look at ways to encourage use and learn; building business by encouraging product usage and e-services adoption.

·         Providing support – emphasizing end-user self-help, followed by support tools for all customer segments.

·         Building an optimized cost structure – developing and leveraging common infrastructure and processes to reduce internal costs.

·         Maximizing Return on Investment through customer and operational analysis

Let me elaborate on each of these in turn.

1.      Establishing Market leadership and building brand through the web. 

In the middle of last year, we started the One Voice evolution, which centered around ensuring a consistent message (look and feel) across multiple channels to reflect the new HP since the merger between HP and Compaq.  Our objective was to transform hp.com into an industry leading destination site. 

For our web sites, we amended the home pages to adopt the new look and also created new online ads.  We also integrated all public .com touch-points, from our eSupport to our online stores.

We also clearly focused on delivering a simple and rewarding experience for visitors to the site by having easy navigations and access points to users based on their profiles and needs. Users can easily click through to our home/home office page, SMB page or enterprise business page.

2.      Driving sales and providing support

Our strategy here is to focus on optimizing the buyer experience and driving utlization. Let me illustrate with an example.

·         In the late 2000, we created “HP in colour” an Asia Pacific end-user website

(www.hp.com/hpincolour) which was developed to help educate on color imaging and printing usage for businesses.  It has grown from a 10-page information, education and advocacy site to a 200(+) page fully fledged B2B strategic marketing platform. 

·         In this site, we provide a product advisory service with a simple framework that incorporated an intuitive tool that assists users in finding the correct Deskjet, Business Inkjet, Designjet or LaserJet that’s suited best to their needs

·         Weighted questions are posed and recommendations made based upon end-user’s business situation/needs

The way we accelerated users along the purchasing lifecycle is through educating and advocating color in the office – up-selling and cross-selling them along the way.  We are able to establish an intent of purchase or track closed loop marketing. 

Customers may either click on to find a local reseller from the information we provide online, request or more information, find an HP Call Center, or download content for them to make a later decision.

This site has clearly reinforced HP’s position in business colour.

On the support front, in this example of the colour site, a resource center was added to the site in April 2002. Here we incorporated self help tools by providing :

–        Practical Lessons – eLearning articles with a business edge “Design your own business templates – fax, letterheads”

–        Projects to Print – downloadable print templates – stationery, invoices, etc…

–        Finishing Solutions – links to information on paper handling solutions, stackers, binders…

3.      Building an optimized cost structure for web marketing. 

Web marketing thrives on an ecosystem. It does not just begin and end with a web page. The enablers of this ecosystem include a customer relationship management infrastructure that can and should be leveraged across other functions in the organizations, the extension of HP call centres and integrated support

4.      Maximising ROI through customer and Operational analysis.

·         Through our web marketing campaigns, we have been able to gauge the type of visitors to our sites, whether they are consumers, SMBs or Enterprises, enabling us to better target our campaigns and content to each of these segments, and ensuring improvements in our quality of visitors to our sites. 

·         For instance, we now have in existence, an HP SMB portal, with relevant sites all linking to this portal, including an SMB print expertise center for SMBs to go online and get recommendations and tips to manage and run their IT environment, simply.
 

 ·         Let me share another example.  The HP Business Advantage – a 12-month pilot program for Named Medium Enterprise segment.  HP wanted to migrate a select set of customers in this segment towards a purchasing relationship with a select group of Final Tier corporate resellers to enhance the customer relationship and enhance the buying process. 

·         We developed a program website which is currently being enhanced to include a login function strictly enabling customer-only access to the program information, monthly printer offers and special promotions. The website also served as a first step for customers to register with the program and indicate their preferred resellers for any printer purchase.  We are also currently developing a Customer Knowledge Management solution where customer profiles, buying history, website and email responses and call centre interactions can be managed and analyzed for future marketing programs

 Conclusion

 With that, let me end off by leaving you with some thoughts for consideration.

There are so many possibilities with the web. Having said that, you need to “Stand out” to catch the “eyeball” of your target audience. You need them to click through and read more before you can achieve your objective of introducing your company, products and services. I would say then that to make an impression; you first need to:

·         Create unique and targeted creatives that encourage customer interaction

·         Offer a good selection of promotional products and bundle offerings with compelling online price points, generating higher number of prospects.  This helps stimulate multi-product purchases within one visit. 

·         Implement comprehensive tracking codes throughout your web marketing campaigns, so that you can successfully generate revenue reports in order to map out ROI and conversion rates.  At the end of the day, if we can’t justify our investments in web marketing, we can’t get the future dollars to carry through a lasting web experience and relationship with our customers.

·         Finally, be willing to try.  There is still so much to learn about the Web. Explore and take some calculated risks, so that you can get more out of the web for a holistic marketing approach for your organization.

Thank you.