Think of Lenovo and what words come to mind? People I have posed this question to often cite ‘Chinese’, and ‘ThinkPad’. Those more knowledgeable about the company add things like ‘innovative’ and ‘growing’. The fact that Lenovo is Chinese seems to be front of mind, however, despite Lenovo having massive R&D and other operations across the planet, including the USA and Japan. It might be headquartered in Beijing, but Lenovo is a truly global company. And it has a lot going on about which it needs to educate the market. To that end, Lenovo has employed a secret weapon.

Arguably one of the finest displays of consumer technology marketing in recent years was HP’s ‘The computer is personal again’ campaign with its Tim Burtonesque font and catchy visuals. The brains behind that campaign belong to David Roman, who Lenovo snatched away from HP less than a year ago to be its marketing chief.