Acer's Iconia 6886

Executive Summary

Acer's Iconia 6886 is the first touch book, which eliminates the physical keyboard by having dual touch screens attached with a hinge just as a standard laptop. While the top screen is used for primary display, the second screen serves firstly as a navigational panel, and secondly as extended display which utilizes the touch book as a dual-monitor (Perenson, 2010). From its touch-optimized experience to its powerful processor and RAM, Acer seeks to satisfy its consumer's demands for both work functionality and leisure elements.

We believe, Acer should softly launch the Iconia into the Canadian market. A soft launch would be beneficial as it would allow Acer to monitor the customer reactions and demands quickly while also effectively utilizing their strong brand name recognition. In order for the soft launch to be successful, Acer must focus their target segmentation on two key groups; the corporate consumer, such as the medical professional and the casual consumer, such as the university students. Both segments combined create a total segment potential of 1,112,370 million (StatsCan, 2008-9). Acer must acknowledge that both the segments are vastly different from one another in terms of demographics, psychographics and behaviour patterns, and use these differences to its advantage by targeting the unique needs of both these consumer groups. This can be accomplished by providing two different operating systems, Windows 7 Enterprise for the corporate professionals and Windows 7 Home Premium for the casual consumer. Furthermore, since the market share breakdown for students is 75% as opposed to 25% for the professionals, Acer's revolutionary design for this touch-book would attract a lot of attention from younger consumers. Consequently, Acer should consider setting up kick-off events at universities to help these consumers get familiarized with the new technology and innovative features of the Iconia 6886. Another very important strategy that Acer can adopt is the use of support programs like the "Acer VAR Partner Program" to help their resellers and partners (Acer, 2011). A support program can be especially useful as it would effectively allow resellers and corporate partners to market the touch book and provide training and technical support where required.

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