Case 20: UNSYS: The Repositioning

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ASE 20

UNISYS: THE REPOSITIONING
THE PROBLEM
In 1986 Unisys, after the reorganization into three separate businesses, positioned itself as The Information Management Company, a term that was very vague. Because of this, Unisys was faced with a dilemma on a global level. What do you do when many of your prospective customers are not even aware of who you are, let alone what you do?
In Europe, awareness of Unisys was low. When asked, “What names come to mind when you think of companies that provide information technology?’’ respondents in France placed Unisys behind IBM, Microsoft, Compaq, and Hewlett – Packard. In some countries, Unisys placed behind Digital, Groupe Bull, and
Olivetti. In Germany, Unisys was not thought of at all.
In most of Unisys’s target market, awareness of the name was much lower than it should have been. The familiarity with what it did was much lower than it should have been. Although some people had a reasonably warm feeling about Unisys, they still thought of the company in terms of being simply a mainframe supplier.
Further research looked at people’s familiarity with
Unisys in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and
Italy compared with Unisys’s major U.S. competitors. The picture was not a pretty one, with only 30 percent of respondents being “very familiar’’ or “somewhat familiar’’ with Unisys, compared with 90 percent for IBM, 78 percent for Hewlett-Packard, and 76 percent for Compaq.
Worse still, this 30 percent had declined from 41 percent in 1992, though it does represent a recovery from 27 percent in 1996. Therefore, this meant that Unisys’s target market did not know the company very well and that it was in a worse position than it was five or six years ago.

HISTORY: THE FORMATION OF UNISYS
Two successful companies merged to form Unisys in
1986, the