Acer pushes multibrand strategy with product barrage

IDG News Service - Acer Inc. took a big step forward with its multibrand strategy on Tuesday, aiming at increasingly smaller demographic slices of the PC market with the launch of two dozen products ranging from wide-screen, all-in-one PCs to tiny nettops.

At an evening launch event outside of New York in New Jersey's Liberty Science Center museum -- which preceded similar gatherings in Beijing on Wednesday and Amsterdam on Thursday -- Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci and other officials reiterated the mantra "thin and light" as central to their design goals.

Long battery life and low price were also mentioned constantly as officials rolled out the new Aspire Timeline notebooks, AspireRevo nettops, all-in-one PCs and netbooks.

"We want to elevate the bar for innovation," Lanci said to a crowd of channel partners and media.

"During this time when people are cutting costs and paying more attention to operating expenses, we are doing the same, but we aren't doing anything to interfere with R&D and product development," Lanci stressed, noting that the company is building a new research center in Shanghai.

When pressed during a question-and-answer session about whether the low-priced devices and new technology will further put pressure on the company's already low margins, Lanci said that Acer's margins are not that much lower than the major hardware makers. "In fact, ours are staying the same, and the other's are coming down to join us," Lanci retorted.

In a time of increasing market consolidation and decreasing technical differentiation among PCs, Lanci said he is more convinced than ever that "a multibrand strategy is the way to go." Acer will keep the Gateway and eMachine brands, he said. The technology inside the branded machines will be the same, while the external design, colors and marketing will differ as the company reaches out to different market segments with each brand.

People attach different attributes to different brands and make emotional buying decisions based on these characteristics, he said. Extensive market research, for example, shows people associate eMachines with "value," Acer with "performance" and Gateway with "social recognition and cutting-edge design."

While notebooks and the all-in-one PCs will run Vista and -- when it comes out -- Windows 7, for now the netbook lines will be running XP, said Lanci and Jim Wong, head of Acer's IT products business.

The officials were somewhat cautious about Windows 7 on netbooks. "When the new netbooks come out, we'll be able to use XP for about another year," said Wong. "We're negotiating on Windows 7." The negotiations are about "the user experience" he added.

"XP was solid and stable when it came out and it's still old faithful," said Jeff Zolnowksi, a senior engineer. "Windows 7 is looking like it's going to be that, and if it is, we'll be able to use it in the netbooks."