Heading a revolution - Aug'08 profile

He joined when the company was not at the best of its times. Dell was losing ground to its competitors in the PC market, falling to No. 2 in market share, and the slump was reflected in slowing PC sales and disappointing results. If you ask Mark Jarvis, chief marketing officer of Dell, of his decision to join the company in April last year, he says, "Because I believed Dell could turn around."

Easier said than done, but Jarvis was determined to bring Dell out of the rut. "We'll be seeing radical changes over the next two years. People will say, ‘Wow, that's Dell!'"

You can't help but appreciate what Jarvis envisions for the company; the marketer has big ambitions. "My dream computer and other interesting innovation plans at Dell are underway - these will give consumers and businesses a pleasant surprise," he adds.

Armed with 16 years of experience in product development, management, marketing and planning experience, Jarvis' very first task at Dell was to do away with price labels from all the campaigns. "Dell wasn't a company that did marketing as much as it did sales. All the campaigns had price labels attached to it. Traditionally, all of Dell's marketing was focused on selling so it was a big change to shift the focus to marketing," he says.

It took six months for Jarvis and his team to attain some level of consistency, and that is when Enfatico was formed. Prior to this, some 869 different ad agencies worldwide worked for Dell, resulting in a look and feel that varied from country to country. "We created our own agency called ‘Enfatico' under WPP, where the online people sit next to the print and catalog. This reduces our cost and makes us more consistent - better still, we will be the first company on this planet that has analytics capability which spans online, offline, phone and retail," Jarvis says.

Three months after Jarvis assumed his role as CMO, Dell kicked off a campaign more colorful and vibrant than anything it had ever done before. "We understand that a computer, like a mobile phone or an MP3 player, is a fashion item and consumers want a coloured one, or they want a solid state hard disk instead of a spinning one and so on. We are very focused on leveraging this."

Moreover, Jarvis recognizes that while technology is ubiquitous these days, "In the last 50 years we have made technology more and more complex. Doing anything with technology today is extremely complicated, and that has become an excuse for making it expensive." However, the CMO adds, "A tough task the computer market faces is to simplify technology, something that Dell is well-positioned to do."

On how well he thinks marketers are leveraging on the social networking boom and the emergence of digital media, Jarvis maintains that online marketing and presence is extremely important to Dell.

"Every day three million people come to Dell.com, and ours is the biggest e-commerce site in the world. We do understand that the internet, which used to just be about receiving information till some time back, has become interactive. And that is where we are heavily investing in," he says.

Another instance to showcase the power of social networking, Jarvis says, is Dell's graffiti regeneration contest, part of its initiative to produce green computers, which it ran on Facebook. "We asked people to draw what green meant to them. The interesting thing was not the 7,000 entries for the contest but the 1.2 million that voted for the best. That's the way social marketing is shaping up," he adds.

While the marketers grapple with how much to allocate to the new media, Jarvis summarises the solution in one line. "Within 24 hours of posting anything on our blog, we see it in about 7,000 different references. That is the power of the online medium."

Amidst the heterogeneity of the discussion, Jarvis can't help reiterating that Dell is undergoing a marketing metamorphosis. He's busier than usual these days preparing for the new branding campaign that Dell plans to launch soon. "If you go to BRIC countries people will have heard of Dell but not necessarily understand what Dell is. It is important for us that they know us as a company they can trust. Similarly, around 85 percent of our consumers in the US think we make consumer PCs, when actually that's only 15 percent of our business. So we are going to create a branding campaign that goes across all our consumers and business networks focused on explaining the Dell value proposition," he says.

And what does this marketer do when not hopping geographies and giving consistency to Dell's image? "I cook," replies Jarvis, "for my family - my wife and daughter, who think I can open a restaurant." While Jarvis has no plans to do just that anytime soon, he is thinking about the future. "If we can turn Dell around and surprise people - that would be my legacy."