Fighting talk

Some of HP's top bosses were in town recently to meet with customers and partners as the vendor looks to fortify its market leadership. Channel Middle East grilled Jos Brenkel, VP of HP's Personal Systems Group for the Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean region, on the company's retail strategy and plans to grow the business in the current economic climate.

What are your priorities for the Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean region?

The key priorities are around a couple of things. The first is to reinforce the brand and consolidate the market leadership situation that we have got right now. If you look at the market share in the Middle East region - and take out Iran where we don't sell - we are bigger than Acer and Dell combined.

It's 30%-plus market share. Market share in itself is nothing other than a measure, but it's a measure of our success in how we execute to our brand value proposition. The second thing that we are putting a huge amount of emphasis on is everything around the product experience and buying experience.

What do you mean when you say ‘experience' and why is that significant?

We believe the market is moving into two environments. There is an area where people buy on price, and that is moving very much towards the low-end notebook type of products. You live on high volumes, low margins and no features - just price.

The other extreme, which is happening more and more, is that people are buying on experience - both the product experience and the buying experience. Those two phenomena are being reinforced in the market right now.

HP recently announced its ‘store-in-store' concept through which retailers allocate an area of their outlets to HP products. What is the thinking behind this?

People want to buy in an environment that is comfortable. If you go to a standard retailer today then the majority of time you are completely lost as to what you are buying. They line up all the products and each one starts with the price point.

You have no idea of the difference between the screen sizes; you just see a price with a whole bunch of features. We are investing huge dollars on creating experience stores with our retailers.

What benefit is there for a retail partner based in the Middle East market to invest in the store-in-store concept?

You will find certain products only available at a store-in-store and we will drive demand to those stores. For example, you are only going to find our TouchSmart PCs in a store-on-store. As we are going to drive demand to those stores, retailers that have invested in the model will get the benefit of all that.

Is there a possibility that rivals will follow your strategy and approach retailers with their own store-in-store concepts?

I am sure they will, but it is too late. How many store-in-stores can a retailer have? There's only so much room and the only other one who is doing it is Apple, but they are using a slightly different strategy in that it is their own store.