All brands have to consider shifting their approach to one of ecosystems - products and services - according to Acer CMO Michael Birkin.
Speaking at the Global Marketer Conference in Sydney today (26 March) Birkin outlined how Acer is transforming its business and brand strategy to position itself as a products and services-based ecosystem to appeal to Millennials. Although Birkin rejects the term Millennial.
"Products remain pivotal to Acer, however, we are broadening our company to incorporate services," he said.
Millennials – people born between 1980 and 2000 - he says, are going to be the most powerful spending generation there has ever been so brands must “dig deeper” and be better at understanding their desires and impulses. He added that while so much is reported about this group, most of it is contradictory.
“We should drop the term Millennials because it’s so hard to create any kind of strategy based on it. It’s actually the connected generation, and that’s not just because we’re a tech firm. It’s the consistent theme that we’re about to rebuild out company around,” he said.
The PC-maker is set to introduce a new business strategy in June that it believes will set the company up to succeed in what it calls the “connected generation”.
BYOC – Build Your Own Cloud – has been developed as an ecosystem of complimentary products and services that tap into the connected generation’s desire to record their lives, says Birkin, although he couldn’t reveal much more about it.
“With all this information and insight around about his generation, lets tap into that and create products and services that they really want, not want we think they want,” he said on stage. “We’re creating an ecosystem that allows people to express themselves.”
Birkin told AdNews after his presentation that all brands must consider how they can move beyond just selling products, to be more relevant to this generation that has grown up online, and digitally, and is obsessed with recording and sharing their lives.
Branding, he says, is more important to this generation than it has been in the past because the “dissemination of the message” is so different in the digital world.
“If you look at what technology has allowed us to do it means that word of mouth is more important than it has ever been but it means something different now,” he said.
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