HP Designjet and Market Segmentation

Coming in 2015 - HP announced a PageWide Designjet family today in San Diego
Today’s press/analyst event for HP’s Designjet Production Premiere is history, and as always it is great to be invited to an activity with an industry leader, even (especially?) the industry leader with whom I was employed for 25 years. Even after over eight years passing since I wore the HP Employee name badge, I have many friends still with HP, as well as countless warm memories from those days. And happily, at this point I have developed many new HP and agency relationships as well. And then there are my fellow analysts, with some of those friendships going back to when I was on the client/vendor side.

The news of the company’s announcement of a coming series of wide-format, page-wide printers went official at mid-day, shortly before our event broke up at mid-day, and no doubt much will be written about the new hardware (due in the second half of 2015 and as yet unpriced and unnamed), as well as the soon-to-be-available Designjet products which were included in today’s announcment (on the hardwarde side, the HP Designjet T3500 Production eMFP and HP Designjet T7200 Production Printer, and a new software solution, the HP Designjet SmartStream Pre-Flight Manager and Controllers).

But for now, in addition to thanking my hosts at HP and Porter Novelli as well as my fellow analysts, for making this a great experience, I’d like to comment on one thing. I mentioned those warm memories when I worked in HP’s Imaging and Printing Group? Back then I remember the high-end graphics teams (both in San Diego and Barcelona) as being exemplary marketers in terms of understanding their customers and designing products and solutions to meet their needs. This has been continued and enhanced and in materials distributed as part of today’s announcement, they identify a dozen different market segments in their product portfolio brochure. This is a great example and one I will be using in my marketing classes as outstanding B2B segmentation.

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