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

Esports Insider sat down with Alia Rosmini, Executive Director of Consumer Marketing, Global at Lenovo, and Karan Kapur, Global Marketing Head of Gaming at Lenovo, at the press conference for the Esports World Cup‘s opening ceremony to talk sponsorship strategy, measuring ROI, and where AI fits into the brand’s approach to gaming and esports.

All competitors through the seven-week competition will be playing on Lenovo monitors, with PC players also using the Legion Tower 7i and Tower 5i desktop PCs. When we visited the Lenovo stand, it was one of the busiest, with fans encouraged to try the new Legion tech, including the Pro Rollable concept (discussed in the interview), and to take part in reaction games to compete for high scores and giveaways.

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

ESI: You’ve talked previously about how the most credible marketing comes from the community itself, especially around your Legion product. How do you translate the ‘community feel’ into a sponsorship strategy that doesn’t feel too corporate?

Alia Rosmini: I understand where you’re going. I think what we like to do is a lot of activations within our strategy as well. Hopefully you’ll come and see our booth — we have a whole host of our creators here with us, we’ve got community livestreams going on.

We’re talking in real time with people, getting a sense of which tournaments they’re enjoying, which games are trending with them, and getting a bit of reality about what the audience and the community are feeling.

It’s a mixture of the two. One is, on a more global stage, this is us saying, “we’re committed to esports, this is what we’re looking to help encourage.” We chose EWC because of the grassroots plans that they have — that’s very important to the brand. We have our own initiatives that we do as well, but it’s really around what we do with our community within the actual tournament itself.

Karan Kapur: I think the best way to market a gaming brand is to not market it. Also, to be extremely conscious — we know gamers are allergic to advertising, me being one of them. We essentially let our creators, our streamers, fans, and teams talk for themselves, and, quite honestly, the word Legion literally means community. And “just don’t market” is the best way to market.

Alia: And we like bringing them here too, so we’ve got tickets to give away, we’ve got all sorts of things for the community to activate, so it’s great.

ESI: The esports bucket is broad — it’s global and fragmented. How do you measure success from a marketing standpoint from an event like this?

Alia: I think we do it in a couple of ways. One is obviously brand recognition — we’re looking at how people are recognising us through the usual brand awareness KPIs. But the other part is, we want to be really authentic to the sports that we play in. Esports is so important to us because it comes down to performance, technology, and the experience for gamers.

We go a bit further with our partnerships. It’s not just about brand association, it’s actually partnership — we use those words really carefully in the sense that it’s our tech.

They are playing on our devices, and we’re also generationally improving our devices based on feedback from real players. It’s a symbiotic, mutual relationship in terms of the partnership. As we’ve always said, it’s about being authentic.

We’re into gaming, we’re into esports, we’re into bringing those experiences to life for players and fans on a bigger stage as well.

Karan: There are a couple of products that we’ve got right now as concepts. One is the Legion Rollable, and you’ll see this when you come to our booth — you press a button and the screen essentially grows sideways.

The reason for that is when you’re an esports player, you want a 24-inch monitor, but when you’re on the move, you can’t travel with your monitor. What if your laptop screen could do that?

That is a key KPI for us — being in a place like this where fans and players get actual hands-on experience and give us feedback on what they want to do. Essentially, esports last year inspired this proof of concept — last year’s Esports World Cup inspired the Legion Go handheld.

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

ESI: In a FIFA case study, you said the goal was “participation, performance, and storytelling” rather than just traditional sponsorship messaging. Is this your template now for esports? You’re also a sponsor of the [football] World Cup — is there a difference from sports to esports?

Alia: We’re being very active at the moment. We’re quite a large brand with very different offerings to all different customers. What we try to do at all times is be as authentic as possible and focused on the customer set that we’re talking to.

For esports, it’s really around our Legion brand and the tech that we’re doing around that — it’s really focusing on how we tell those stories. We’ve got all the creators who are going to be on site, we’ve got behind-the-scenes content, we’ve been working hand in hand with EWC on how we can bring those stories to life. It’s the tech, it’s the experience, and then it’s all the stories that come off the back of it.

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

They also help shape the content and even the product strategy, as we shared, in what we’re doing next.

Karan: If you just look at real life, I have a 14-year-old kid who loves to play soccer on the field. He comes back home and plays eFootball and Rocket League. It is happening, we’re just reflecting reality.

I think that what makes Esports World Cup so relevant is that they have more people playing games than the populations of some countries. You’ve got Fortnite, Valorant, Apex Legends, chess, and Rocket League, across all genres and age groups, it’s universal, so it makes perfect sense for us to try and ride that wave of goodness.

ESI: When you go to your CFOs and say, “I need this much spend, we want to do this in esports,” how do you show them that esports has actually moved the business? What do you present to them to say this is worth doing?

Karan: We literally had to last week.

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

Karan: Also, esports, six or seven years ago, was for a few — the sweaty, competitive gamer. Not anymore. Today, esports has a reach of hundreds of millions, and it’s not just one kind of game, it spans all genres.

When we go to our CFO all we need to do is show to him and her — we have both — that this has a reach of 450 million gamers worldwide. It’s the most efficient and effective way to reach that audience, which means it’s at the same broad-reach level as FIFA or Formula One. It is not a niche. It is mainstream across society and across the world.

ESI: How has AI fitted into Lenovo? Has it enabled you to do anything that you haven’t been able to do before with regards to esports and gaming?

Alia: We’re deploying AI and creating AI solutions across the board. What we’re seeing is that it’s helping us optimise task management. When we look at the creative space, which gaming obviously is, we’re seeing more and more ability to create content — for example, all the indie game development that’s coming through as well.

It’s really an enabler, that’s the best way I’d describe it. It’s freeing up more task-oriented workflows for more creative work and outputs.

Karan: I think at the heart of it, our job is to enable gamers, enable creators, and enable streamers with our devices. And across workflows, as Alia said, it hugely accelerates creation and development. To shoot and edit a video would have taken us weeks, but now it takes days.

Publishing was limited for the few; today, it’s encouraging a lot of indie publishers and promoting a lot of indie game developers. I don’t think it’s just AI, I think it’s tech in general.

We’re humbly serving the community needs of creation, streaming, gaming, and development.

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 into this piece.