Lenovo on why ‘not marketing’ is the best way to market Legion at the Esports World Cup

Esports Insider sat down with Alia RosminiSenior Director of Consumer Marketing, Global at Lenovo, and Karan KapoorGlobal Marketing Head of Gaming at Lenovo, in a press conference of Esports World CupOpening event to talk about funding strategy, measuring ROI, and where AI fits into the product process in games and sports.

All competitors in this seven-week tournament will be playing Lenovo monitors, and PC gamers who also use i The Legion Tower 7i and Tower 5i desktop PCs. When we visited the Lenovo stand, it was one of the busiest, fans were encouraged to try new Legion technologies, including the Pro Rollable concept (discussed in the interview), and to participate in reaction games to compete for high scores and prizes.

Editor’s note: This interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity.

ESI: You’ve talked before about how honest marketing comes from the community itself, especially in regards to your Legion brand. How do you translate ‘community sentiment’ into a funding strategy that doesn’t sound too corporate?

Alia Rosmini: I understand where you are going. I think what we like is a lot of activation within our strategy as well. We hope you’ll come and see our booth — we’ve got a bunch of our creators here, we’ve got a community live stream going on.

We talk in real time with people, we get a sense of what competitions they enjoy, what games are trending with them, and we get a little truth about what the audience and the community are feeling.

It is a mixture of the two. Another thing is that, at the global stage, we are, “we are committed to sports, this is what we are looking to help promote.” We chose EWC because of the low maintenance they have – that is very important for the product. We have our own plans as well, but it really depends on what we do with our community within the tournament itself.

Karan Kapoor: I think the best way to market a game product is not to market it. Also, to be very careful – we know that gamers can’t handle advertising, I’m one of them. We basically let our creators, broadcasters, fans, and teams speak for themselves, and, to be honest, the word Legion literally means community. And “just don’t market” is the best way to sell.

Alia: And we like to bring them here as well, so we have tickets to give away, we have all kinds of things that the community can use, so it’s great.

THIS: The esports bucket is wide – it’s global and fragmented. How do you measure success from a marketing perspective from an event like this?

Alia: I think we do it in a couple of ways. One is obviously brand awareness – we look at how people perceive us with standard brand awareness KPIs. But the other part is, we want to be really true to the sport we play. Esports is very important to us because it comes from performance, technology, and experience of gamers.

We are slowly moving forward with our partnership. It’s not just about the product organization, it’s actually the partnership — we use those words carefully in the sense that our expertise.

They play on our devices, and we automatically improve our devices based on feedback from real players. A symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship. As we’ve always said, it’s about being authentic.

We are into sports, we are into sports, we are determined to make those events come alive for the players and fans on the big stage.

Karan: There are a few products we currently have as concepts. Another is Legion Rollable, and you’ll see this when you land on our site – you press a button and the screen expands sideways.

The reason for that is that if you are an esports player, you want a 24-inch monitor, but if you are traveling, you cannot take your monitor with you. What if your laptop screen could do that?

That’s an important KPI for us — to be in a place like this where fans and players get real experience and give us feedback on what they want to do. In fact, last year’s esports inspired this proof of concept – last year’s Esports World Cup inspired Legion Go mobile.

So I think that’s a big KPI for us. Not impressions, just not access.

THIS: In FIFA’s research, he said the goal was “participation, action, and storytelling” rather than the usual sponsorship messages. Is this your current esports template? He is also a sponsor of [football] World Cup – is there a difference from sport to sport?

Alia: We are very active at the moment. We are a large brand with very different offerings for all different customers. What we always try to do is be as authentic as possible and focus on the customer set we are talking to.

Sports, it’s close to our Legion brand and the technology that we do around that – it’s very much about how we tell those stories. We have all the creators that are going to be there, we have the behind-the-scenes content, we’ve been working with EWC on how to bring those stories to life. Technology, experience, and then all the stories behind it.

Is this something we do in all our partnerships? Yes, absolutely. We find it’s a great way for us, as a brand, to think and be true to the audience we’re talking to.

They also help shape content and even product strategies, as we share, in what we do next.

Karan: If you just look at real life, I have a 14-year-old who loves to play football on the field. He returns home and plays eFootball and Rocket League. It happens, we show the truth.

I think what makes the Esports World Cup so important is that it has more people playing sports than the population of other countries. You have Fortnite, Valorant, Apex Legends, chess, and Rocket League, for all genres and age groups, available all over the world, so it makes sense that we try and ride that wave of goodness.

THIS: If you go to your CFOs and say, “I need this much money, we want to do this in the arenas,” how do you show them that esports has really taken off the business? What are you presenting to them to say that this should be done?

Karan: It was literally due last week.

Alia: Gaming as a business is clearly growing and continues to do so. Looking at esports itself and the evolution from it, we heard at the Esports World Cup press conference about how it is expanding and becoming mainstream. For us, it’s a really good example of that – the market is moving in this direction, this is where esports has a really important role to play as a brand, and we feel we have an important role to play in it as well.

Karan: And, the sport, six or seven years ago, was for the few – the sweaty, competitive player. That’s not the case anymore. Today, esports can reach hundreds of millions, and it is not just one type of game, it includes all types.

When we go to our CFO all we have to do is show him and him – we have both – that this is accessible to 450 million gamers around the world. It is a very effective and efficient way to reach that audience, which means it is on the same level as FIFA or Formula One. It’s not a niche. It is available throughout the community and throughout the world.

THIS: How did AI fit into Lenovo? Has it enabled you to do anything you couldn’t do before in regards to games and sports?

Alia: We deploy AI and create AI solutions across the board. What we see is that it helps us improve the management of work. When we look at the creative space, which games obviously are, we see a lot more potential for content creation – for example, all the indie game development that comes with it.

It’s really empowering, that’s the best way I can describe it. It frees up a more task-oriented workflow for more creative work and results.

Karan: I think at the heart of it, our mission is to empower gamers, empower creators, and empower broadcasters with our devices. And throughout the workflow, as Alia said, it greatly accelerates creation and development. Shooting and editing the video used to take us weeks, but now it takes days.

Printing was limited to a few; today, it promotes many indie publishers and promotes many indie game developers. I don’t think it’s just AI, I think it’s tech in general.

We humbly serve the needs of the creative, streaming, gaming, and development community.

Esports Insider’s travel and accommodation for the Esports World Cup in Paris was paid for by the Esports Foundation. The Esports Foundation had no editorial input on this piece.