The newly formed Dell Technologies has created a brand architecture that communicates the values of a family of businesses.
Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer of Dell Technologies, can spin a tale, even if it is something as mundane as selling tech products or data protection suites or raising awareness around security threats. He was faced with an interesting challenge when the Dell EMC merger created Dell Technologies, and the mandate to create the brand story was assigned to him. In conversation with Noor Fathima Warsia, Burton shares how he approached the task at hand.
Excerpts:Dell is as much a consumer-facing brand as it is business-facing. What did this mean for you while creating the overall brand architecture?We see Dell Technologies as a family of businesses that provides essential infrastructure to organisations to build their digital future. We are not trying to communicate that through a single brand. Our approach is to have an overarching brand such as Dell Technologies to represent our top-most promise. And then, we have a series of underlying brands — Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, and VMware — that explain to businesses and consumers how they deliver on their piece of that overall promise, while standing on their own as distinct, and in some cases very different, brands. This approach isn’t common in the IT industry, but it is in others. Take automotive for example. There are some car companies that have an overarching brand — Volkswagen/
Audi for instance — that represents a set of characteristics you want to convey to a market, but also fairly different sub-brands that stand on their own — such as Lamborghini. You can think of VW/Audi as Dell Technologies, and perhaps Pivotal — something way out of on the leading edge of engineering — as our Lamborghini.
And how did you manifest this in the visual appearances of these brands?We began at the starting point. We wanted to establish that what we have created is a new company that encompasses a set of strong brands, while still nodding to the past, as many of our customers are familiar with and value what came before. The Dell logo, with which the world is familiar, is still the centerpiece of our visual identify, but we refreshed it just a bit and in the case of Dell EMC, we added a refreshed treatment to EMC to ensure that the new company benefits from the strong brand position that EMC held in the IT space.
To visually represent the main brands such as Dell Technologies, Dell and Dell EMC, we decided to associate them with different times in the day and night. For Dell Technologies, which is meant to be a strategic partner to companies looking to reinvent themselves for the dawn of the digital age, we have a ‘dawn’ theme. In case of Dell, since we deliver client devices such as workstations, notebooks and 2-in-1s which make every professional’s day productive, we have the ‘day’ theme. For Dell EMC, which is about delivering the infrastructure that enables all applications that run our customers’ businesses and the world — something that happens under the covers, hidden from view — we have a ‘night’ theme.
Does this grounding in technology give any competitive advantage to you as a marketer?Yes. We have actually been running a big data marketing analytics lab for a few years now, built on our own technology. It has made a huge difference in how and when we approach customers with technology that we think can make a difference in how they better connect with their own customers.
Business technology is touted as the next industrial revolution — how does this impact marketing?Marketing becomes an even more strategic part of the business because it is marketing’s responsibility to understand what businesses and consumers want next. The next industrial revolution will bring an enormous increase in data and the capability to process that data — 1000x more data and 1000x more capability in fact — to help businesses, through marketing, make smarter decisions about what businesses and consumers want next. I do not think I’m going too far in saying that marketing will be at the centre of every business’ ability to be successful.
What is the marketing strategy for your brands in a country like India? How do you see the Dell Tech brand story unfold there?The Dell Technologies brand story can unfold more quickly in India. We see Dell Technologies at the forefront of driving digital transformations across companies, industries, and countries. We see India as one of those countries that has most aggressively embraced digital transformation as a whole.
What is the most exciting part of your job?How often do you get to launch the brand of a $74 billion company? I consider the opportunity to build the Dell Technologies brand a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that is very exciting. We have such an incredibly rich story to tell — from our technology, to our strategic partnerships, to the way we will be able to help our customers move the world forward towards a digital future. It is really a comprehensive story, but it is one that we are confident about delivering.
