Categories of consumer
Some market research conducted by Acer has revealed four main categories of consumer: the trend-setters, the brand-conscious, the followers and the price conscious. Acer's multibrand strategy is designed to cater for each of these segments while avoiding overlap and consequent cannibalisation between the associated brands.
What this boils down to is that the Acer brand is now intended to appeal to the trend setters, Gateway in the US and Packard Bell in Europe are meant to be for the brand-conscious and eMachines is targeted at the price-conscious. The followers just buy whatever the trend-setters tell them to, apparently.
Acer asserts that this brand positioning represents the culmination of its multibrand strategy. "The user will be able to associate a memory to each line, each curve on the casing, an emotion that will allow him or her to establish an exclusive and unique relationship with the brand and the product itself," insists the press release.
The manifestation of all this frantic strategising is all the shiny new products launched this week. We've already told you about the mini-desktop using NVIDIA ION graphics, the Timeline range of notebooks and an all-in-one desktop, and you can see images of the rest on the subsequent pages of this piece.