GLOBAL INTEGRATION
Anneliese Olson aims to seamlessly weave HP into customers’ lifestyles.
Anneliese Olson, vice president and general manager, global head of home printing solutions at HP, has spent her nearly 25-year career at HP traveling the world, helping the company drive its transformation in the technology market. Living and working across countries has reinforced Olson’s conviction in HP’s efforts to fully integrate its technology into its customers’ lives, especially as their work and personal lives continue to converge.
Her HP career started in Customer Insights, completing projects in 30 countries, giving her a foundation of listening and understanding HP’s customers. As HP supported her development through numerous roles both horizontally and vertically within the organization””ranging from product and category management, to enterprise and retail, to printing and PCs, to the Asia Pacific market and back to the United States””this focus on customers and their experiences with HP has remained a guiding theme she continues to emphasize.
“Each piece is a way to make sure we are relevant to what we are doing for customers,” said Olson. “We are not going to innovate for the sake of innovation. What HP has recognized in me and has put me in the intersection to influence the business and drive the right portfolio with the customer and market insight in mind.”
Working within a multibillion-dollar global company with a heritage of innovation, Olson is addressing the challenge of relevance as generations of customers have shifted how and where they are printing. According to Olson, megatrends such as mobility, rapid urbanization, security, and personalization are shaping the home of the future and HP wants to be at the forefront of that movement.
“HP will continue to deliver the best in class solutions for owning that intersection of where digital and physical come together,” said Olson. “In the home of the future, we are looking to be at the right place in the digital path of life for our customers so that we provide the right on ramps and off ramps for that experience is what we will shape and transform into.”
An example of this strategy in play is HP’s Sprocket mobile printer. This pocket-sized, sleek, white device can produce wallet-sized photos from your phone or tablet and can take any image from a customer’s social media platform and bring it to life.
“Customers were saying their photos were trapped in a digital jail inside their phones,” said Olson. “But, the second they print them for themselves or to give to someone else the relevance and emotional connection people make to the physical implementation is powerful. This product has opened up a new category of customers of people who have never printed before, 18- to 22-year olds. HP is building upon that to reinvent memories, reinvent connections, and using that to reignite the home.”
Looking more closely at the future of the home, increasingly we are seeing work life intertwined with personal life. Illustrating this shift, the growth of freelancers, those who work from their homes in virtual offices, has doubled every year since 2014 in the U.S. Driving a lot of the change are the millennials, who will account for approximately half the workforce by 2020. They are digital natives who are accustomed to living in a digital world and they are looking for easy-to-access information at their fingertips without taking 20 clicks to get what they want. This convergence of customers’ professional and personal lives is forcing many companies, including HP, to think differently about the products they are developing. Customers need to be able to collaborate across multiple organizations and be able to print anywhere.
“We talk about “˜one life’ as the overarching strategy for print,” said Olson. “It isn’t just home, office, or industrial. It’s the fact our customers are living one life and it’s 24/7. A day in the life of customer means sometimes they’re on a plane, at home, in an office, in a coffee shop. We’re looking at how we’re making a blueprint for them.”
To cater to these mobile professionals, the company has rolled out numerous innovations. Recently, the company unveiled cloud-based HP Roam, which allows these professionals to print securely from any location and any device to specific print locations at an office, home, or public site such as a hotel. HP is also the first to have voice-enabled printing on all three major platforms, Google, Alexa, and Microsoft.
Also driving HP’s strategy to reinvent the home, reinvent brands, and lift productivity is the continued rapid urbanization of our population. As more people flock to cities, living spaces are getting smaller. Increasingly, said Olson, professionals may not even have a separate home office, which means tech-makers will be fighting for space inside a person’s home.
“You have to earn your right to stay in somebody’s path of life,” said Olson. “You have to have devices that are relevant for the kinds of printing people do.”
Another part of fostering a direct relationship with the consumer is though personalization, which HP continues to explore. According to the Pew Research Center, 40% of millennials have one tattoo or more in the U.S., which speaks clearly to their desire to clarify their identities. As many readers may recall, HP’s partnership with Coca-Cola to personalize can labels with names was a promotional success. More recently, HP linked up with Elle Magazine for its April 2018 issue to send out 50,000 personalized messages from media celebrity Kim Kardashian to subscribers.
“The intersection between digital and physical is where we see these opportunities play out,” said Olson. “As the reinvention of print happens, HP’s devices and solutions can wrap around it.”
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