Dev411 Blog

I was recently in the market for a AMD 64 notebook because I wanted a portable system to do x86_64 linux testing. The HP Lance Armstrong L2000 series notebook was one that I came across. The technical features were fairly standard so it didn't stand out for me. From a marketing perspective however, each laptop is branded with the LIVESTRONG logo, has Lance's signature, comes with a yellow wrist band and provided a $50 donation to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Certainly the yellow LIVESTRONG wrist bands were decent business (counterfeiters were convicted and fined $111,000 for selling fake wrist bands), but I wondered how many people would buy a notebook computer because of Lance Armstrong and the LIVESTRONG program

My question was answered in July's Business 2.0 magazine which says the Lance Armstrong notebook has sold over 40,000 units and is the best selling laptop at CompUSA for 2005Q3. Originally $50 was donated for each laptop sold but now it's been increased to $150 and the laptop has its own website. The laptop is now sold exclusively at CompUSA - I'm not sure if CompUSA had an exclusive before or if this after their great success. Additionally, HP has picked up 2 points in market share against Dell since the program started and AMD's market share has gone from 9% to 11% (of course a lot of AMD's rise is due to price-performance, not Lance's notebook; the HP vs. Dell numbers may also be due to Dell's reluctance to use AMD). Some good insight into the power of brands.