Marketing Strategy and Competition at HP - Assignment Example

? HP.COM Company Background Information The existence of HP could be attributed to two 1939 Stanford graduates and classmates, Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett. This company’s exact first product is said to have been an audio oscillator together with an innovative sound system built within a Palo Alto garage. This company was eventually incorporated within 1947, and currently provides services, solutions, software, technologies and products to individual customers, medium- and small-sized businesses, as well as large enterprises with the inclusion of consumers within the education, health and government sectors. The company’s global operations have been said to e directed from California’s Palo Alto in the US, which is its headquarters. On the other hand, its US operations have often been directed from special facility within Texas’ unincorporated Harris County near Houston. The Latin American offices to this company are situated within Florida’s unincorporated Miami-Dade County, in Medellin Columbia near Miami (Hennessey and Jeannette, 2004). In Europe, its offices are in Switzerland’s Meyrin close to Geneva. In Asia-Pacific, its offices are located in Singapore. Moreover, it possesses large operations within Plano, Texas, San Diego, Colorado, Fort Collins, California, Roseville, Idaho and Boise. Within the United Kingdom, HP bases itself on a considerably large site within Bracknell, Berkshire with the offices having been located within several locations including a landmark tower office within London’s 88 Wood Street. The company’s websites is created to be accessed by every individual within the globe without any issues, with the delivery services being executed upon order from consumers. Overall Strategy HP’s recent strategic move might be referred to have been out rightly outstanding. Its decision to do away with the hardware systems and lay focus upon enterprise software, appropriately waved the white flag, as well as ceded the dramatically changing personal computing business into Apple when it made public its intentions of jettisoning its customer hardware division together with scrapping its poorly selling mobile product line so as to concentrate on business services (Dorfler & Heuveline, 2007). According to a variety of analysts, HP’s move seems to have been an original idea of an outsourcing powerhouse IBM, having continuously bundled the hardware that it no longer owns to its outsourcing deals. This has been considered HP’s ‘appropriate correction’ within the industry, exiting the markets where it could be attaining a hiding and concentrating on the enterprise clients that desire for alternatives to the giant powerhouse, IBM. In case it technically rids itself off the computer business, it might offer the customers who might be wary of outsourcer, thus pushing its own hardware an impression that it is vendor-agnostic (2007). Marketing Strategy The company seems to be taking transformative, bold steps in order to drive the creation of long term value of shareholders through a concentration of fewer fronts, thus improving its capability of executing, investing in innovation and driving a higher margin business mix. However, it is clear that actual transformation within the outsourcing industry calls for more than just shifting the dollars from hardware devices to software devices. Although laying focus on software and other services might not necessarily enhance those sectors in the future, but it enables the company to concentrate on a particular consumer base and fully satisfy their desires within an industry that is less saturated and less competitive; the outsourcing industry (Burkett, 2002). However, the move to outsource its business cannot guarantee that the company would not be faced any competition. In fact, stiff competition might be posed by the Indian based companies like Cognizant, Infosys and may others. In order to fight back, the company possesses a majority stake within Mphasis, the Indian IT service provider and could opt to fully roll it into the outsourcing business (2002). One or two smart acquisitions to bolster its ultimate enterprise services presence has been known to brew, a well executed business and management reorganization, a clear and cohesive marketing plan would definitely draw the company into fulfilling its potential. All these might be said to be HP’s signs of determining its ultimate focus and future identity; IT outsourcing consumers could typically be within multi-year agreements considerable reliance on their provider for long term success, have comfort that this might not just be another attempt by HP to grow in share price. This, thus, results to considerable increase in sales and consumer reliance as well as shareholder trust. Website With regard to the company’s website, the brand of the company is effectively reflected through its brand logo ‘hp’ that has visual elements or aspects of its business. In fact, it reflects an ambitious organization, which will evolve gradually and foray to new, related business venture. The website contains several features, with each revealing the brands available for its consumers and the entire business community as a whole. Moreover, the website’s homepage effectively reflects its most recent touch sensitive PC with an offer for any of its consumers interested in purchasing any of its PCs. Services Offered The services offered by this company range from outsourcing, consulting, as well as technological services across business process, applications and infrastructure domains. This company effectively delivers to its clients and consumers by leveraging investments within support and consulting professionals, standardized methodologies, infrastructure technology as well as global delivery and supply. It offering services, the company management has effectively divided this into four distinct business units; business processes outsourcing, applications services, technology services, infrastructure technology outsourcing (Feurer, Chaharbaghi, and Wargin, 1995). The Infrastructure technology Application is said to encompass the work place and the data center (desktop); communications and network; and consulting, support and security services together with warranty absolute support across all product lines of HP. The technology services offerings have been notably available in the service contracts forms, pre-packaged offerings or on individual bases. HP’s application service, on the other hand, incorporates application development, modernization, testing, maintenance, management and system integration (1995). Moreover, the Application Services also accords technology consulting together with systems integration services and solutions, which make use of cloud computing, enterprise mobility, hybrid delivery, real-time analytics and information management. Services of Business Process Outsourcing incorporate both cross-industry and industry-specific solutions. Its solutions to cross-industry issues include a series of enterprise-shared services, administrative services, financial management services and consumer-relationship management services. Site Usability and Design Just like it is often claimed that the power of a webpage to attract more usability often lies on its homepage’s ability to create an impression, HP’s homepage could be simply referred to as a masterpiece. The homepage is often the exact first- and most likely the last-opportunity to draw and retain consumers (usability). With regard to this company’s website, therefore, its homepage effectively features an offer for any PC bought either within the retail stores or even on online stores. Since the ultimate goal of each company is often to make sales, this company, too, in a bid to champion user needs, tactically boosts its sales with regard to the offer. The mere inscriptions of the bold words, ‘Buy a PC and get a free NOOK Simple Touch’ definitely draw users to the website with the desire to know more about the company and the offer, thus improving on the site’s usability. Against these inscriptions, moreover, is an option where interested users might opt to click in order to view more details, thereby increasing the likelihood of more accessibility to the company’s other services and products. Process of Purchase The HP Business to consumer integration server is appropriately centered at the needs and the desires of its consumers. Based and established on WebMethods technology, this site enables the company to rapidly and efficiently connect to its consumers running several distinct platforms, while providing consistent sets of transactions to the systems of HP. This server, even though it is unrecognizable, is the single point by which the user would access the website and submit his purchase order to the company’s fulfillment system by filling a purchase order form. The following is the proceeds required by the consumer before he finally gets his purchase: 1. The user ought to log in to his internal procurement system 2. The user would then begin to shop within either the punch out, HP-managed website or the static consumer-hosted catalog. 3. When the user finishes selecting the products that interest him, the internal system would route the request made for appropriate approvals. 4. Upon receiving the request, the server would turn it into a purchase order and would be submitted to HP. 5. HP would then receive the order and configure the product (in case it is required) and then ships the order. 6. HP would then send an invoice for the already shipped products, which would be available through EDI. The user might access the spending and reporting data from the internal system. 7. The HP product order would eventually arrive at the site of the user. Catalogues HP catalogues could be said to be primarily comprehensive listing of goods available from the company during the publication year. The following are a few names accorded to these catalogues: ‘Test and Measurement’, Measurement/Competition’, ‘Instrumentation’ and many others. From the onset of the era of computers, such hardbound books had between 450 and 850 pages in general. Earlier, the company often included information regarding pricing although this information began phasing out of these catalogues by late 1970s. The 1992, 1986, 1984, 1982, 1981 and 1979 did not have pricing information incorporated in them. However, by 1993, prices started reappearing (after phasing out the computers). These catalogues possess both product number and alphabetical indices. However, a product might still appear within the catalogue even if it is not within the indexed list. Most of its models (having people and not products) viewed in this company’s catalogues are its employees; the employees that often worked for a division that made the essential product. Search Engines With regard to search engines, the management of HP together with Microsoft management opted to make plans of making use of Bing as a default search engine to HP’s devices within forty two countries. Moreover, MSN would be effectively set as default like its homepage. This, according to HP, is just an expansion of the previous agreement in which the company was to ship its 2009 PCs with a live search toolbar (Gengler, 1986). Indeed, live search had been Bing’s predecessor. This would be extremely effective in marketing its products even to individuals who would not have the idea of accessing the website but would be thinking of purchasing one of its products (Ramos & Stephanie, 2009). Shopping Carts Items within the shopping cart often reveal the most recent prices displayed upon their products pages. During a consumer’s shopping experience, he could save a cart then resume up to three days later by recording his saved cart ID then clicking up on ‘retrieve cart’ within the store (Gengler, 1986). With this, the company might make individual consumers’ shopping experience great and draw them more and more its products. Consumer Loyalty Cards These are extremely effective depending on the design. The HP loyalty cards would have an automatic offer upon retrieval. These cards would awarded to any customer who shops within the HP stores and when he visits the stores the next time and produces the card, he would be offered a gift or he would but a product at a relatively lower cost. This is meant to draw consumers to the continuous purchase of its products (Kotler & Armstrong, 2012). References Burkett, Holly. 2002. "HP Strategies for System Alignment and Renewal." Performance Improvement 48.1(2). Dorfler, W., and V. Heuveline. 2007. "Convergence of an Adaptive Hp Finite Element Strategy in One Space Dimension." Applied Numerical Mathematics 57.10 (1108-124). Feurer, Rainer, Kazem Chaharbaghi, and John Wargin. 1995. "Analysis of Strategy Formulation and Implementation At Hewlett-Packard." Management Decision 33.10: 4-16. Gengler, B. "Hewlett Packard Security Strategy. 1986. " Network Security 1999.9 (1999): 6-7 "HP Enters the RISC Business." Electronics and Power 32.3 (195). Hennessey, Hubert D., and Jean-Pierre Jeannette. 2004. Cases in Global Marketing Strategies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. “Kiplinger's Personal Finance.” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. Washington, DC: Kiplinger Washington Editors, 2000. Print. Kotler, Philip, and Gary Armstrong. 2012. Principles of Marketing. Boston: Pearson Prentice Hall. "New Hewlett-Packard." 1996. Chemical & Engineering News 42.33(6). Ramos, Andreas, and Stephanie Cota. Search Engine Marketing. 2009. New York: McGraw-Hill. Series 80 Software: Catalog of Application Packages and Contributed Programs. 1992. Reston, VA: Reston Pub. Wang, Jianfeng, and Sylvain Senecal. 2008. "Measuring Perceived Website Usability." Journal of Internet Commerce 6.4 (97-112). Read More