As a veteran IT OEM, Hewlett Packard was affected by an aging image, its new products lacked appeal, and a slowing PC market. Traditional promotion methods were not attracting media attention or the interest of young consumers.
To combat this, FleishmanHillard developed a series of online and offline promotion activities around the insight that young consumers like novelty, live shows and video, and used social media to explore new stories and interact online. This led to a mass of high quality media coverage.
FleishmanHillard prepared original content to raise awareness, including in-depth articles and BBS posts, to promote the new products, the event theme, and to arouse attention for the launch. At the launch itself, we needed to show the changes that had occurred at Hewlett Packard, so we designed a novel new product display and invited Internet celebrities to experience the new products. Fans could take photos with e-sports teams and movie characters and then share the photos on social media.
Approximately 200 people attended the event, including IT, lifestyle and gaming journalists, fans and HP employees. Two key gaming media outlets broadcast the event live, and more than 200,000 watched it online, further expanding the event reach. Over 500 clippings and 100 WeChat mentions were collected, with some of the latter reaching 10,000 views. The HP Pavilion Gaming notebook was No. 1 in sales in the PC category on JoyBuy.com. The campaign reached over 3 million people who learnt about the launch of the new products, and the equivalent AD value was over 5,032,750 RMB.
