Outsourcing Marketing?? - Lenovo's Marketing Hub in Bangalore

When the Chinese PC giant lenovo acquired IBM's PC business for $1.75 billion in cash, stock and debt in one stroke, it vaulted from being the world's eighth-largest PC maker to the third-largest, after Dell and Hewlett-Packard. The brand Lenovo chalked out a five-year transition to switch to a Lenovo-only brand -- it has a five-year brand licensing agreement with IBM to use its brand. The branding initiatives of the company have been criticized by many marketing experts like Ries& Ries.

The latest development in the marketing front involves making Bangalore the global marketing hub from where it would drive all the marketing initiatives of the company. The hub is expected to formulate marketing strategies and create marketing deliverables for print and online. It will also track the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns launched by the company around the world.

There are many reasons for the choice of India as a Hub for its global marketing activities, some as stated by the company; Indian marketing and creative team is currently its best and has the experience of building brands from scratch. Others include the fact that they want to route all their marketing deliverables including advertisements and brouchers through the hub and thus avoid duplication and the obvious advantages of reduced costs of having it done in India.

Another reason part from the talent and cost savings by shifting operations to India is that by doing so they would be closer to a market which they consider to be one of the most important one in their future growth plans, but the question is outsourcing Marketing activities to India the same as outsourcing your call center activities or maybe your pay roll processing? Is it not going back to the centralized system, where the marketing people would be too far from the markets in which they operate???