Although MSI was well known for motherboards and graphics cards, there was still the old stigma that it’s technology was on par and the looks slightly below average. The previous years the brand developed high end, more sleek looking products, but the market opinion didn’t catch up yet.

Global HQ had little funding for the European market, this made branding and other forms of marketing difficult from a European HQ level and we needed to look at the B2B customers to do the marketing for MSI.

With a low margin, high volume product, in a competitive market with well known competitors like ASUS and Gigabyte, how are we going to improve the product approval rate of the brand through the B2B partners?

MSI, a Taiwanese tech powerhouse, excels in crafting cutting-edge gaming hardware, renowned for pushing technological boundaries. Famed for their high-performance gaming laptops, motherboards, and graphics cards, MSI consistently delivers sleek designs, robust components, and innovative features that cater to the demands of passionate gamers, earning them a global reputation for excellence.

Tech brands like MSI attract a global community of tech enthusiasts who crave high-performance computing. Whether gamers, content creators, or professionals, customers seek innovation, reliability, and stylish designs in laptops, desktops, but also in components. With a passion for cutting-edge technology, they trust shops and reviews.

Although the end customer is described above, the direct customers are shops that buy through distributors all around Europe.

Since there was not enough budget from Global HQ we started looking at how we could fund any form of marketing that didn’t need to go through Global HQ approval.

We quickly noticed that most distributors were not willing to put in any extra effort. They didn’t care if they sold brand A or brand B, since most of them were selling multiple brands, turnover would end up in their bank account either way. The only way they were willing to start contributing was when there were large marketing budgets.

On a shop level we noticed purchasers, marketing and sales was all willing to put in some extra effort if they felt connected to the manufacturer. Their budgets were small, but their enthusiasm was interesting

The smaller shops had a large impact, but would need some extra funding. MSI was very competitive on price and we decided to increase the price for every product with about 2%. This money would be used as a marketing kick-back. On the next quarterly price list all prices communicated to distributors were increased. They were not amused because they said “it will cost sales”. We created a statement that MSI would stick to the new pricing in order to reward higher contributing shops.

Based on turnover, market influence, people who we knew influenced the purchase/sales strategy and how consumers felt about the shop, we marked potential partners. With two people we went to all these shops to give product training. These trainings were informal, fun and not overly MSI branded. We mainly focussed on graphics cards because we felt this was a strong product range.

When we were there we tried to make an appointment, or at least discuss with the marketing department, on how to improve sales for them. After these meetings and informal discussions we would appoint budgets in the 1 to 5k range depending on their size and made sure that products on shortage (this happens quite often with new chip launches) were first available for them. Support on marketing campaigns by the MSI designers was available. The only condition was they needed to report directly on motherboard and graphics card sales.

Within 3 months the first results were visible, sales at these shops had increased a lot. The reports gave us insights in what competitor products were selling and where MSI was strong and could improve. This was used for the marketing strategy the quarter after, where we saw an even bigger increase in sales.

After roughly 9 months when this whole process started MSI was making quite the name for itself. Review sites and power users started supporting the brand more and more. Sales people in the shops loved talking about MSI because they felt they were connected to the brand and had direct connections with its employees.

12 months in, Gartner reports came out the market had declined with an average of 6%. This checked out with the reports we were getting from distributors. At the same time graphic cards sales for MSI was up 220% and because the brand was getting this much attention it also benefited the motherboard sales.

Even though it seemed like an almost impossible challenge, especially in the first months of research, large growth was realized with a relatively small budget.

Understanding and getting to know the end customer greatly improved the process. As I dive into markets, I want to understand what is going on to personalize your marketing campaigns.

There are plenty out of the box marketing concepts, but making a real impact requires attention to detail. Weather it is a large scale campaign, a small website or branding a full product range.