Marketing Strategy for Dell: Analysis of Marketing Mix and Environment

This report analyzes the marketing strategy of Dell, including its marketing mix and environment analysis. It also provides insights into the company's competitive advantage and segmentation, targeting, and positioning strategy.

Marketing Strategy
Marketing Mix & Environment Analysis
Dell

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Executive Summary
The report lays down the marketing objectives for Dell and the strategies it has to adopt in order to
achieve a larger market share and gain dominance over its competitors. Dell is positioned as a low
cost, customizable PC, Laptops and tablet offering Technology Company. The company has made a
name for itself by offering excellent customer service quality which undoubtedly becomes its USP.
Dell, however is lagging behind the competition, primarily because of its low spend on marketing
and hence in order to reach the pinnacle of success the company has to exploit the tools of digital
marketing to the fullest. It is recommended that Dell has to increase its revenue and increase the
brand awareness in the target group of 15-24, hence targeting the audience through mobile and
digital marketing will deliver some amazing results for the company.

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Table of Content
Part 1.....................................................................................................................................................4
Brief Introduction..................................................................................................................................4
Environmental Analysis-Dell..................................................................................................................5
Macro Environmental Analysis..............................................................................................................5
PESTLE Analysis..................................................................................................................................5
Political Forces...............................................................................................................................6
Economic Forces................................................................................................................................6
Social Factors.....................................................................................................................................6
Technological Factors........................................................................................................................7
Legal Factors......................................................................................................................................7
Environmental Forces........................................................................................................................7
Marketing Strategy-Dell Perspective.....................................................................................................8
Competitive Advantage- Dell Focus.......................................................................................................9
Part 2...................................................................................................................................................10
Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning Strategy of Dell..................................................................10
Marketing Analysis- SWOT, USP, Competition & STP......................................................................11
Identification of Marketing Objectives............................................................................................12
SMART Goals...................................................................................................................................12
Dell- Marketing Strategies...............................................................................................................13
Marketing Strategy..........................................................................................................................13
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................15
Bibliography.........................................................................................................................................16

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Part 1
Brief Introduction
Dell was founded in the year 1984 by Michael Dell by the name of PC limited with a capital of $ 1,000
and a game changing vision about the design, manufacturing and selling of technology in the future.
The company soon changed its name to Dell in the year 1987 and has now become one of the largest
Multi -National computer Technology Company. The headquarters are located at Round Rock, Texas
United states and employees over 100,000 people1. The company is in the business of developing,
selling, and repair of computers and also supports the computer and related product and services.
The company sells PC’s,Laptops, servers, data storage devices, switches, software, computer
peripherals, HDTV’s, camera, printers, players and electronics built by other manufacturers. The
company has made a name for itself in the computer industry and boast of a global reach. The
company is presently focussing on the developing economies and is providing them with best of
computer devices to strengthen the existing ecosystem of laptop market.2 Dell faces strong
competition in the Hong Kong market from its rivals HP & Lenovo.
1 Y. He, 2017. Supply risk sharing in a closed-loop supply chain. International Journal of
Production Economics, 183, pp.39-52.
2 J. Stark, 2015. Product lifecycle management. In Product Lifecycle Management (Volume
1) (pp. 1-29). Springer, Cham.

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The purpose of the report here is to understand and analyse the current marketing strategy and
position of the company. The report will also focus on the USP of Dell; perform an environment
analysis for Dell. The report will further focus on the competitive landscape in the laptop market and
conduct a SWOT analysis for the company. Microsoft, HP, IBM, Apple and Lenovo are the main
competitors of Dell. The report will give an insight about the micro and macro environmental forces
which are critical to the company.
Environmental Analysis-Dell
The purpose of environmental analysis is to focus on the external and internal factors which might
affect the business in the future; hence the organizations have to take a calculated move in order to
prevent the damage from the uncertain environmental conditions. Micro and macro environmental
forces thus play a very important role. 3
Macro Environmental Analysis
Macro environment can affect any kind of business and hence it is advised that companies do a
thorough understanding of the forces relevant to macro environment and accordingly make a back-
3 K.L. Kraemer, J. Dedrick, and P. Sharma, 2009. One laptop per child: vision vs.
reality. Communications of the ACM, 52(6), pp.66-73.

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up plan for any adversity in the future. PESTLE 5 forces is the most popular model which is used for
the analysis of Macro environment.
PESTLE Analysis
DELL is one of the renowned brands when it comes to PC & Laptop industry, globally, the company
has created a positive image in the minds of consumers by providing quality products further
supported by excellent customer service guarantee. The Laptops of Dell are considered as safe,
reliable, equipped with good performance and pocket friendly. PESTL analysis will help in
understanding the effect of external environment on DELL.
Political Forces
It has been seen that the political forces have a major impact on businesses which are operating
internationally. The global players have to deal with the growing political pressure, policies related
to foreign businesses, tax regulation and the ever hanging political environment. In context of Dell,
the prevailing tension between US and China and cause trouble to the US laptop giant. In addition to
this, political stability plays an important role, if the government changes it changes a lot of policies
which might affect the business of Dell.
In the last few years, the European union have been facing a lot of political and economic turmoil
which has been affecting the business of Dell in a lot of European countries. Dell depends on China

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for the raw material and cheap labour, hence if relation between US and China do not improve
quickly the company will either have to look for an alternate market or suffer a major blow.4
Economic Forces
Economic forces not only change the condition of the nation but it can also adversely affect the
purchasing power of people, further slowing down the economy. The world is recovering from poor
economic condition of few nations, especially in the EU; this has significantly affected the business of
Dell. Although the Asian economy is doing good, but Dell has not been able to penetrate the market
to the level as expected earlier. Hence, reduction in the purchasing power of the consumers,
coupled with slow growth rate of an economy can cause problems for any brand.5
Social Factors
Social factors play a very important role for businesses, especially with the changing ecosystem of
technology, companies have to keep on reinventing themselves to better suit the needs and wants
of the consumers. The pattern has now been shifting from large PC’s to compact desktops, tablets
and smartphones, all the brands are doing their best to use the economies of scale to best use. It can
thus be said that in order to be ahead of the race brands have to consistently keep revamping their
product strategy to fit the growing needs of the consumers
Technological Factors
It is a known fact that Dell is a technology company and hence the company keeps on inventing new
products according to the changing consumer behaviour and technology. Over the last decade
smartphones have hurt the PC and the Laptop market significantly, hence Dell has been hurt
adversely due to the changing technology ecosystem. Dell has been consistently been changing its
brand strategy to target its existing and new customers, but, the sales have dropped after
proliferation of Smartphones and Tablets across the globe.6
4 L. Xu, J. Chen and A Winston, 2011. Price competition and endogenous valuation in search
advertising. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(3), pp.566-586.
5 A.B. Nielson, 2017. DELL: 2: 1 Convertible Notebook (Bachelor's thesis, BI Norwegian
Business School).
6 M.T Khan, M. Durrani, A. Ali, I. Inayat, S. Khalid, and K. H. Khan, 2016. Sentiment analysis
and the complex natural language. Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling, 4(1), p.2.

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Legal Factors
Complying with the legal requirement of a nation is really important for any brand having
international operations, as different nations have different legal requirement thus the international
brands have to comply with all nation’s requirement.
Environmental Forces
The governments have been going really strict with preserving the environment and have posed
severe fines on the companies not complying with the environmental regulation. Customers have
also become aware of the growing euphoria around the environment and thus prefer to buy from
companies who are focussing on environmental sustainability. Dell is not behind its competitors and
has invested heavily in recycling; energy efficiency and other areas to improve the impact Dell
product have on Mother Nature.
Marketing Strategy-Dell Perspective
Marketing strategy can be understood by analysis the 4P’s of marketing mix of any company. The
marketing mix focuses on the company Product, price, place and promotion strategy, and how the
company used these parameters to classify its market and keep market dominance over its
competitors.

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Product  Leading producer, distributer and
marketer of PC, Tablets, Laptops and
computer peripherals.
 Dell believes that marketing is not only
limited to providing goods to the
consumers, but it is related to catering
to the changing needs of the
consumers.
 The company provides a number of
products which cater to the needs of
both family and businesses.7
Price  Dell changes its pricing strategy
according to the life cycle the product
falls into.
 Dell focuses on producing low cost
laptops for its audience.
 Dell has been cutting prices recently to
cut the competition.
 Dell products are customizable and
hence its price is a function of
customization.8
Place  Place is the channel for distribution of
Dell’s product. Dell uses retailers,
distributers and warehouses for the
distribution of its products.
 Place is the component Dell excels in, its
products are available at the nearest
dealers and thus customers have easy
access to Dell products.9
Promotion  Dell uses both the traditional and
contemporary tools of marketing to
promote its products.
 It is heavily focussing on the Digital
medium to increase the brand
awareness of its products.
 The company keeps on sponsoring a lot
of industry events to create the brand
awareness.
 It has recently gotten into organizing
quiz and contests for people to
participate, thus increasing the product
7 M.H. Pederson, 2017. DELL Technologies (Bachelor's thesis, BI Norwegian Business School).
8 C.A.Bayer, 2017. Optimizing shipping pricing on Dell. com on build to order notebooks to US
consumers across customer experience, profitability and working capital (Doctoral dissertation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
9 A.I. Larsen, 2017. DELL Technologies (Bachelor's thesis, BI Norwegian Business School).

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sales.
Competitive Advantage- Dell Focus
One of the biggest competitive advantages the company has is due to its logistic dominance over
other players; the company maintains a direct relationship with the consumers despite using a retail
channel. The company also follows a built to order strategy for its consumers, giving it an edge over
its competitors. There are other parameters which makes Dell unique in the way it is, some of the
notice worthy points are:
 Dell has an extremely fast communication system.
 Dell keeps its IMC clear and sound, thus everyone is aware of what Dell does the best.
 Dell selects partners after a detailed scrutiny and tries to keep a long term association with
them.
 Dell has a minimum number of suppliers to be in a position to check the product quality.
 The company uses the modern day’s tool of digital marketing for increasing brand
awareness.
 The company focuses on the best solution and not just the technology, the
comprehensiveness of its solution is one of the biggest USP of the company.
 Dell has adopted a unique innovation strategy; it listens to customer’s problem in order to
solve them so that a positive impact can be created in the society.
 Dell has one of the best supply chain networks, which makes its product easily available in
the market, at the nearest dealer.10
 Dell has a customer centric approach, the company believes in fostering a positive
relationship with the customers based on the pillars of trust, faith and mutual respect. Due
to this the company has been able to retain a large number of its customers. Further adding
to it is the customer service centres of Dell; these are one of the best consumer service
centres which are always on their foot to resolve customer query and concerns.
10 A. Salem, A. Ghafar, M. Ibrahim, M. Yousuf and N. Ahmad, 2015. Product perceived quality
and purchase intention with consumer satisfaction. Global Journal of Management And Business
Research.

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All the points mentioned above serves as unique selling point of the company and also help Dell to
build a competitive advantage over other players in the market.
Part 2
Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning Strategy of Dell
Dell segments its offering on the basis of Psychographics & Demographic factors. It basically targets
people who are tech savvy, professionals, working in tech industry and executives. Dell works to
make its consumer channel engagement strong in a bid to stay ahead of its competitors. A strong
connect, followed by excellent service to its customers are the biggest contributors to the success of
Dell. Strategy of Dell is Global, it believes in staying closer to the customer so that it can build a long
lasting relationship with them. User and Benefit based strategies is the positioning strategy of Dell.
Marketing Analysis- SWOT, USP, Competition & STP
Parent company Dell Incorporation
Sector IT & Technology
Tagline Power to do More, Yours is here
USP Dell offers customizable products to its
consumers.
Segmentation People in a lookout for customizable laptops and
PC
Targeting Home users, business users, government users,
business houses, large corporates, urban sectors,
colleges, school etc.
Positioning The company has positioned itself as a leading
provider of customizable products.
Strengths  Strong customer support 24*7
 Excellent customer services
 Customizable products
 Brand loyalty and recognition
 Merger & Acquisitions
 Direct model approach

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 Strong advertising and branding
strategies
Weakness  Less number of exclusive stores of Dell
creates some problem for Dell, it is
slowly moving into a completely online
model of sales.
 The sluggish growth in the market due to
increased competition.
Opportunities  Increase in the e-commerce sector has
opened new realms for Dell’s online
stores
 Dell can tap the low priced tablets in the
rural areas to increase the penetration
 Tie ups with a number of institution
 New product development.
Threats  Consistency in technological
advancement, soon a disruption can be
harbingered in the Laptop sector
 Computers become out-dated due to
increasing innovation
 Rise in competitors which are providing
low cost laptops posing threat to Dell
Competitors HP
Toshiba
Apple
Lenovo
Acer
Identification of Marketing Objectives
Identification of marketing objectives sets the tone for any business organization, and hence it
becomes really essential to define SMART goals/ objectives for the firm. SMART goals are one of the
most important frameworks used to define the marketing objectives of any company. The SMART
goals are highly specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant and are time based. For the purpose
of this study, SMART goals will be created for duration of one year for Dell.
SMART Goals
S-Specific  Create brand awareness among the
target group 15-24 Years
 Increase the revenue by a margin of
15% from the preceding year
 Increase the digital footprint of Dell by
a margin of 20%
 Increase the traffic on the website by
25%
 Increase the engagement and
conversation on Social media sites by
10%

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M-Measurable
All the goals mentioned above are measurable
via:
 Brand awareness can be mentioned by
noticing the online behaviour of the
targeted group
 Sales number is a direct measure for the
revenue.
 Social mention, number of Impression
will help in measuring the digital
footprint.
 Number of people coming on the
website
 Social media monitoring
 Focus on the Asian market and create a
market dominance
A-Achievable  All the numbers mentioned are
achievable because of the historical data
collected in the past, and also realizing
some loopholes in the earlier marketing
strategy. The new marketing strategy
will help in getting the desired numbers.
R-Realistic  The goals mentioned are realistic as the
company has done remarkably well in
the recent past and surprised the
management, thus it has to repeat the
history.
T-Timeline All the goals have to be achieved in a duration of
1 year, W.e.f 1st of march 2018
Dell- Marketing Strategies
Marketing strategies helps a company to achieve the desired goals and objectives. The goals set for
Dell revolves around increasing the brand awareness, increasing the revenue, increase in customer
footprint, increasing the digital footprint and establish a market dominance In the Asian economy. In
order to achieve all the objectives, the company will have to create a formidable strategy to achieve
the set goals.
The primary function before setting up a marketing strategy is to deeply analyse the entire
marketing mix of the company. As mentioned in the earlier part the company wants to focus on the
Laptop division, keep its prices low, wants to sell laptop via global model and use both the traditional
and contemporary methods to market and promote its product. The company has a competitive
leverage over other new players owing to its strong brand loyalty and brand recognition; moreover
it’s USP of providing excellent customer service and support 24*7 makes the company ahead of the
race. Hence the entire recommended marketing strategy for the company has to revolve around its

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marketing mix. The marketing strategy will thus focus on increasing the sales numbers and creating a
very strong digital presence to tap the targeted audience. Digital in the last few years have created a
very strong impact on the marketing strategies of domestic as well as international brands. Brands
are investing in huge sum of money to cater to that audience and build a relationship with them. The
rise in millennial and the growing internet penetration has made the targeting easier. Adding to it,
business analytics tools help in doing a profile targeting on any device a person uses to access the
internet. Thus, the entire marketing strategy has to revolve around digital communication and less
focussed on traditional modes of communication11
Marketing Strategy
Goals Marketing Strategy
Increase the brand awareness among the age
group 15-24 years
This is the fastest growing consumer audience
for Dell. The audience consist of college, school
going kids and early professionals. They will be
using the laptops in their daily life and Dell has to
target this audience segment. In order to do so,
Dell has to go forward with Mobile targeting and
Facebook targeting. The age group is the one
which is consistently engaged with digital media
and hence it becomes easier to target them
through the channels of digital marketing.
Increase the revenue by a margin of 15%
In order to do so, the company will have to
adhere to the following strategy:
 Increased promotion on TV, Print and
Digital media.
 Increase the number of impression to
the target audience.
 Buying ad inventory on Google ad-
words, Facebook and you tube for
banner and video promotions.
 Conducting quiz and contest to increase
both the brand awareness and revenue
for the company.
 Sign up a celebrity from tech world to
promote its hi spec laptops
Increase the digital footprint by 20% In order to do so, the company has to do
extensive promotions on social and digital
media. Dell has to sign up with various bloggers
and tech forums to write about their latest
11 G. Jackson and V. Ahuja, 2016. Dawn of the digital age and the evolution of the marketing
mix. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, 17(3), pp.170-186.

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products. This will help the tech enthusiasts
know more about the company and its
innovation. Facebook is the fastest growing
social media site and thus Dell has to ensure that
it creates good engagement on Facebook. It has
to come up with daily posts which are engaging
for the audience and wants the consumers to
interact with the brand.
Increase the traffic on the website by 25% The same has to be achieved by employing both
organic and inorganic tools of marketing. The
organic tools comprise of SEO and inorganic
tools comprise of SEM.
As part of the organic strategy Dell has to put
relevant content on the website with the best
performing keywords in the tech industry. This
will certainly help Dell in achieving a high ranking
in the content relevancy and organically the
company would appear on top every time
somebody searches about laptops and related
product.
The company has deep pockets and thus it can
spend some money on search engine marketing.
The SEM will allow Dell to come on top of the
organic search showing paid advertisement to
the audience.
Another thing which the company has to do is by
delivering number of impressions on the popular
tech sites, such as mashable, tech crunch and on
social media sites, you tube and so, All these
strategies in comprehensiveness help in reaching
the set target.
Increase the engagement and conversation on
the social media page by 10%
Dell has a very good brand loyalty and a good
brand recall, this however has to be translated in
the numbers and achieve revenue for the
company. Social media plays a very important
role in achieving this metric. The TG of Dell is 15-
24 year people, this TG is always mobile and
hence mobile and social targeting will be really
beneficial to them.
The company has less reach on Facebook and
Instagram, in order to increase the reach Dell has
to come up with a campaign “Participate to Win
Dell”, under the campaign post a lot of quiz,
contest and relevant material to increase the
engagement with the audience.
The company has been slow with posting regular
updates on the social media sites; it has to
definitely come up with posts targeting the
target group of Dell.

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Following the above mentioned strategy, Dell would be in a position to achieve the SMART
objectives laid for the company and increase the brand awareness, market revenue and digital
footprint in the industry. It certainly will also help the company to make a connect with the new
audience which will further translate into numbers.
Conclusion
Dell is one of the leading marketer, producer and manufacturer of Laptops, PC and computer
peripherals. The company operates globally and without having a retailer in its channel of
distribution the company has created a name for itself in the market of PC and laptops despite facing
tough competition from numerous players. The company has been living up to its excellent customer
service and after sales support, this can also be seen as the USP of the American giant. However, it
has been felt that the company has not been doing exceedingly well, like the way it should have.
There are gap in its marketing strategy which poses a challenge for its ubiquitous position. Hence,
certain things have been strategized for Dell as a part of its marketing strategy. The company has to
focus on the tools of Web 2.0 in order to spread awareness in the market, focus on the Asian
economy and take the leverage of its dominance in customer support and service. Digital footprints
of Dell are low in comparison to its competitors and thus the right way to move forward is by
deploying the gimmicks and tactics of digital marketing.
Bibliography
Beyer, C.A., 2017. Optimizing shipping pricing on Dell. com on build to order notebooks to US
consumers across customer experience, profitability and working capital (Doctoral dissertation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
He, Yuanjie. "Supply risk sharing in a closed-loop supply chain." International Journal of Production
Economics 183 (2017): 39-52.
Jackson, G. and Ahuja, V., 2016. Dawn of the digital age and the evolution of the marketing
mix. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, 17(3), pp.170-186.
Khan, M.T., Durrani, M., Ali, A., Inayat, I., Khalid, S. and Khan, K.H., 2016. Sentiment analysis and the
complex natural language. Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling, 4(1), p.2.

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Kraemer, K.L., Dedrick, J. and Sharma, P., 2009. One laptop per child: vision vs.
reality. Communications of the ACM, 52(6), pp.66-73.
Larsen, A.I., 2017. DELL Technologies (Bachelor's thesis, BI Norwegian Business School).
Nilsen, A.B., 2017. DELL: 2: 1 Convertible Notebook(Bachelor's thesis, BI Norwegian Business School).
Pedersen, M.H., 2017. DELL Technologies (Bachelor's thesis, BI Norwegian Business School).
Saleem, A., Ghafar, A., Ibrahim, M., Yousuf, M. and Ahmed, N., 2015. Product perceived quality and
purchase intention with consumer satisfaction. Global Journal of Management And Business
Research.
Stark, J., 2015. Product lifecycle management. In Product Lifecycle Management (Volume 1) (pp. 1-
29). Springer, Cham.
Xu, L., Chen, J. and Whinston, A., 2011. Price competition and endogenous valuation in search
advertising. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(3), pp.566-586.

Marketing Strategy P a g e | 17