"AI is an opportunity that arises once every 30 years," says Lenovo's CMO on working with B2B, B2C, and AI

AI as part of everyday work, not a source of anxiety

According to Ketchen, the company's marketing function should "live and breathe" AI technology, rather than succumbing to anxiety about it replacing human roles. She compares the current AI hype to what previously happened with technologies like RAM or 5G connectivity—in her view, over time, AI will become as familiar and "background" a technology as those, rather than a topic for discussion.

Ketchen oversees marketing for both the consumer segment and corporate clients worldwide, noting a fundamental difference in approaches to each: B2C communication follows a "one-to-many" principle and targets a mass audience, whereas B2B allows for much more targeted and personalized work with specific clients.

Speaking about the promotion of AI PCs, Ketchen called it a "unique opportunity that arises once every 30 years"—creating an entirely new product category for two audiences that do not yet fully understand why they need AI in their laptops, as they have not yet experienced it. According to her, the marketing task here is to articulate the real benefits and what distinguishes Lenovo products from competitors amid the overall rise in interest in AI within the industry.

Team training and a new slogan

To prepare the organization for working with the new technology, the company established an AI governance council, involving the security and legal departments. Before launching anything, the team conducted a survey among marketers to find out what they specifically wanted to learn about AI.

Based on this feedback, Lenovo developed its own 11-step educational program in collaboration with a renowned external AI expert and secured corporate licenses for tools, enabling employees not only to use the technology but also to understand how it works. As Ketchen notes, to effectively promote an AI product, marketers must first understand what AI is themselves.

Alongside training, the company revised its brand positioning: the previous slogan smarter technology for all became smarter AI for all, and a separate version was introduced for the consumer segment—smarter AI for you.

How Lenovo builds partnerships with brands

Ketchen detailed how the company approaches sponsorship agreements in general. She stated that at the outset, it is crucial to clearly define the essence of the partnership and ensure that the values of the company and the partner align—this is where many brands make mistakes. Next, the focus shifts to storytelling: how the partnership story is presented on social media, in PR, and other communications, how employees are engaged, and how work with events and customer activations is structured.

Investments in such partnerships are significant, so Lenovo pays close attention to measuring effectiveness—from brand metrics and tracker data to regular communication reports and comparisons with competitors following specific sponsorship campaigns.

Partnership with Formula 1 and FIFA

Ketchen described the long-standing partnership with Formula 1 as particularly illustrative: she noted that F1 is one of the most technological sports in the world in terms of precision and technical complexity—from pilot preparation to the design of the cars themselves. The F1 team already tests new Lenovo products at races—for example, the new AI-enabled ThinkPad X9 was recently unveiled in Shanghai.

Since the F1 calendar includes 24 stages across different locations over 40 weeks, Lenovo's regional teams must devise unconventional local activations. Examples include a campaign in Tokyo, where 13 screens on skyscrapers in the Shibuya area simultaneously displayed 30-second clips of the racing car. In London, Piccadilly Circus showed a video featuring a 3D model of the car that appeared to drive out of the advertising screen directly onto the street.

According to Ketchen, since the start of the partnership, the F1 audience has grown from 500 million to 750 million people, with the fastest growth coming from Generation Z and female audiences—while CIOs and top-level tech managers remain a significant portion of viewers. To simultaneously reach both racing fans and IT leaders, the company uses Seedtag's contextual targeting technology, which uses AI to combine these two audiences—this increased the effectiveness of reaching the target audience by 55%.

Flexibility as a key skill

Ketchen separately addressed the adaptability of the marketing function in the face of a constantly changing external environment. She stated that flexibility is today's key quality, and the marketing team's task is to stay informed about global developments and act proactively whenever possible. She noted that this "muscle" of flexibility was largely developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies had to pivot on the fly—and Lenovo now strives to leverage this experience, as well as its reputation as an innovative market player.