Tuesday, December 4, 2007
HTC Gets Serious About Branding
Posted by Nurhisham Hussein in "NEWS" @ 03:00 AM
"High Tech Computer (HTC) has hired Jason Juang, former vice president and general manager of personal systems group at Hewlett-Packard (HP) China, as an executive vice president, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report. Juang, a 17-year veteran of brand operations and channel sales at HP, will supervise HTC's brand products in Europe, the US, Japan, and the Middle East and Asia Pacific, the paper quoted HTC CEO Peter Chou as indicating."
Don't bother following the link - the above is all she wrote. While I wouldn't necessarily pick HP as a paragon of branding prowess, the news report does signal that HTC is serious about improving customer brand awareness - I mean, who's heard of the HTC Touch (probably HTC's biggest success story this year), outside of WM enthusiasts and those actively shopping for a PDA phone? While HTC's efforts at selling their devices under their own name over the past year has had some success, the company really needed a head honcho in charge of consumer and enterprise marketing to bring all the pieces together - what with the acquisition of Dopod, the evolving relationships with carriers, and the first tentative steps to their own retail channel. I've only just started seeing HTC commercials on TV here, but there still isn't enough airtime to compete with the likes of Nokia or Sony-Ericsson for consumer attention. How's this going to work out for HTC? Stay tuned!
Don't bother following the link - the above is all she wrote. While I wouldn't necessarily pick HP as a paragon of branding prowess, the news report does signal that HTC is serious about improving customer brand awareness - I mean, who's heard of the HTC Touch (probably HTC's biggest success story this year), outside of WM enthusiasts and those actively shopping for a PDA phone? While HTC's efforts at selling their devices under their own name over the past year has had some success, the company really needed a head honcho in charge of consumer and enterprise marketing to bring all the pieces together - what with the acquisition of Dopod, the evolving relationships with carriers, and the first tentative steps to their own retail channel. I've only just started seeing HTC commercials on TV here, but there still isn't enough airtime to compete with the likes of Nokia or Sony-Ericsson for consumer attention. How's this going to work out for HTC? Stay tuned!
