HP redefines their value proposition for PCs!

Do you know what you are selling to the user?
Is it a thing (a unit, a box, a software package) or does that thing get associated with a solution, or feeling or a belief?
In this day and age of globalization, it is relatively easy to get another ‘thing’ made cheaper and do more. Perhaps a SaaS focused product can come and eat away at your category by allowing easy to use, bite-size usages of your product. Certainly, products get duplicated relatively fast and get commoditized quickly.
But a solution, or feeling, or a belief is more than the product, it is the combination of services, trust, partners, ecosystem that you can create as a vendor. To provide some simple examples:
– If I’m in the Security space, I’m selling safety.
– If I’m in the device space, I’m selling productivity.
– If I make software tools, I enable easy communications.
These are the fundamental (and non-specific) examples of what a value proposition needs to be. It is not a piece of software that has 9 features vs. somebody else’s software package that has 8 features.

HP is doing a new advertising campaign, announced in the WSJ and Business Week last week, for personal computers. If ever there is a thing that is a commodity, an HP PC could qualify. But as I read the ad, and look the visual, I believe that HP is going to sell trust in the product and the connection between people that computers enable. The tagline is “The Computer is Personal Again.” The overriding image is a hand, to reinforce the personal relationship to the PC and show consumers that HP enables connection with the touch of a button.