The Study On The Marketing Strategy For P Series Of IBM China

As a time-honored corporation, founded over 100 years ago, and has been operating in China for 30 years, IBM has been leading the IT industry with its technology and continuous self-reinvention. The electronic tabulating machine, personal computers, servers and artificial intelligence have been all the key milestones in the IT industry evolvement. Once relying on its dominating position in the market, IBM could take a considerable market shares very easily. After going through the nearly go bankruptcy crisis around 1993, IBM has undergone a series of critical business transformation.Since 2013, the slowdown of global economy, the reduced growth rate of China’s GDP, the exposure of PRISM, and the elimination of IOE initiated by Alibaba, together with the IT industry shifting to the 3rd platform, cast unprecedented challenge to the hardware business of foreign enterprises, including IBM. IBM’s hardware business decreased at double-digit speed. In Oct 2014, IBM sold its x86 server business to Lenovo, and then divests itself of its chip business. Therefore, to meet the challenges, forming more effective marketing strategy is of critical significance to IBM’s hardware business.This Paper is divided to into six chapters. The first chapter is introduction, which introduces the research background, IBM as a corporation and the P series product, also establishes the research target, purpose, meaning and methodology. The second chapter is literature review, in which, the concept and theories of marketing are illustrated. The third chapter is the analysis part on the P series of IBM, including the external analysis on PEST, adding the natural environment part, which is a growing issue in China. What’s more, this part analyzes the market from the current condition, trend of development and customer behavior’s perspective. Last but not least, the internal analysis of P series on its resource and competence is also carried out. The fourth chapter is the STP analysis, while the fifth chapter is the marketing strategy part on product, price, place, promotion and service. The last chapter is the summary part.