‘I Feel This Year Could Be One Of Our Biggest Festive Seasons Ever’

Every August, technology company Acer celebrates its founding day - Acer Day - globally. This also marks the time when the company gives back to its customers and community, organizing many engagements and community activities. This year’s Acer Day, in its ninth consecutive edition, saw a series of events centered around the theme "Break A Limit," focusing on gaming, technology, music, and cosplay. 

#BreakALimit celebrates pushing boundaries, unlocking new possibilities through technology and is a brand-wide campaign that brings together innovation, lifestyle, and consumer engagement like never before. This year, Acer has also teamed up with leading sports brands to spotlight the shared values of drive, discipline, and performance, whether in sport or in tech.

Sooraj Balakrishnan, Associate Director & Head of Marketing, Acer India, says, “As a company that provides hardware, we are more of an enabler in your journey, as a creator, an engineer, or a gamer. We have a device for whatever you want to do, and that enables you to break a limit. It's inspirational as well, where the device should not hold you back; your passion and skills should take you to whatever you want to do and break the limits. That's been the concept.” 

Acer has been driving this with engagement activities and community outreach around AI and how cutting-edge AI can be part of people’s lives. Being a PC provider, Acer highlights how PCs can go to the next level with AI, be it for gaming or non-gaming, and how customers can use AI to break limits. Balakrishnan says, “The challenge currently is that people are more familiar with using AI online or editing. They still don't know how to make use of AI on the hardware, the power capabilities which we are building into our hardware. Events provide the platform for us to educate customers on how to make use of the on-device AI capabilities.” Acer also organizes gaming tournaments across their stores during this period. 

A Sport-ing Collaboration

This year, Acer collaborated with leading sports brands for its "Break A Limit" initiative. This partnership between brands helps target the relevant TG, aged 16 to 24, common to both brands. Associating with sporting and energy drinks brands helps the brand Acer integrate itself into the lifestyle of the partnering brand, creating a seamless brand association. One such partnership is between Acer and Adidas, with both brands having a lot in common. 

“When we look at such associations, we look at partners who add value back to us. We are very careful in choosing these partners when we do such programmes, and such associations give you a brand uplift,” Balakrishnan stated.

Looking at the media channels used, a big portion of the budget was spent on digital, retail experiences and events, and very little on traditional media, to reach out to TG who are typically cord-cutters and digital natives. In addition, CTV plus OTT and YouTube were used to target this TG.

Leveraging AI For Marketing

When it comes to using AI in marketing, currently, only the first level of AI tool capabilities is exploited to execute mundane tasks, such as creative output and templatized creatives, on a faster scale. Explaining AI’s use at Acer, Balakrishnan says marketers should go beyond content and the company is exploring AI in media planning. He believes that AI should be used across all brand touchpoints, and a marketeer should have a say on how the brand is experienced. 

He says, “From a marketing standpoint, we are integrating AI into how people reach out to us. Our tech stack for ORM (online repetition management) is for customer queries. We are automating through AI so that when consumers experience the brand, it is a seamless omnichannel experience where they don't feel a difference between interacting through an online store or a physical store. Marketers cocoon themselves to just media and content, however a marketer should have an influence across all the brand's touchpoints.” 

He adds, “Insights come to our CRM (customer retention management) from various places. We have in-house CRM where we do data analytics on the customer journey and using that data, we are able to analyze using AI, which mediums are working well, and what products are doing better on which media channel. For example, gaming generally does better on social media while for mainstream media it's non-gaming laptops. Based on the data which comes as insights, we allocate our media budgets. That's how we are using AI analytics to ensure we reach out to the right audience on the right medium.”

Coming to VR, Acer uses VR at its flagship stores to give customers a touch and feel of its product range. Even if a product is unavailable at the store, VR allows consumers to explore and experience the product and how the features can help the user in gaming, AI coding etc. Further down the line, he is optimistic that Meta’s new Ray-Ban and Oakley AI glasses could be used at the consumer-level to elevate experiences.

The Big Gaming Opportunity 

The Indian esports market size was estimated at approximately USD 200.7 million in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 1,088.4 million by 2033, growing at a 18.40% CAGR during 2025-2033, according to IMARC Group. As per Statista, the number of users in India is expected to reach 147.9m users by 2029.  Another key push is the government’s proposed bill that recognizes e-sports as part of the list of official sports. 

On its part, Acer has conducted Predator Gaming League and has expanded it from eight to over fifteen countries in the Asia Pacific region. The league has served as a launchpad for many emerging talents in the region, with USD 2.15 million in prize money awarded to date. 

Since inception in 2018, the gaming event has run continuously, and even during COVID-19 it was held virtually. Balakrishnan says, “This is one of the largest gaming tournaments in Asia Pacific where we provide a platform for all professional e-sports players with global exposure. We have an India leg, and the winner plays in the grand finale against all the top countries in Asia Pacific with significant price money offered.” 

In addition, Acer also runs the Predator Academy - which includes activities such as tournaments, community engagement, boot camp, sponsorships - where budding e-sports players are trained, given opportunities to participate in amateur tournaments across multiple cities. He states, “We are completely involved in the community right from the amateur level right up to the professional level.”

Next year, Acer will host the seventh edition of the Asia Pacific Predator League in Delhi, India at Pragati Maidan. Teams from over 14 regions will compete, in Dota 2 and VALORANT, in the e-sports tournaments for the total prize pool of USD 400,000.

Targeting Different Audience Set

The audience set for gaming varies from the casual amateur gamer to the professional gamer and from the PC gamer to the laptop and the mobile gamer. Typically, most people usually start off with gaming on mobile; once addicted they look to playing on bigger screens and purchase PlayStation or Xbox that creates an immersive environment. In addition to PCs, Acer also has TVs in their portfolio specifically built with features for gaming, such as fast refresh rate, low lag, great speakers etc. 

Balakrishnan says, “If a consumer wants to take up console gaming, we have devices including joysticks etc, a PC for them to migrate too. From a marketing point of view, we target mobile gamers who play advanced games and target that audience to market our gaming laptops.” The messaging used is - Why are you playing on a small screen, imagine playing on a 16-inch, top-of-the-line PC. He adds, “We communicate that they're missing out on something, and we nudge to migrate the mobile gamers to PC gamers. Another area is students who want to use a PC as an all-in-one device, from gaming to studies, projects, coding etc. A PC for gaming is very powerful, and it can be used for all the above.

The Festive Season

Flipkart’s Big Billion Days sale and The Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2025 will start of the online festive sales in September followed by the retail and offline channels starting end September/October. Balakrishnan is optimistic on the festive season this year and says, “We will be heavily spending on marketing and have a full 360-degree plan, with all mediums activated. This is going to be a big season, particularly for our appliance division, post the GST relief announced by the government, and this will mean that consumer sentiment will be very high to buy our appliances. 

A lot of excitement is building up in terms of the festive season, and this year could be one of our biggest festive seasons ever and we are gunning for a big festive season. As a brand, Acer is the fastest growing PC brand in the country. We are currently number 3 and want to finish much higher by the end of the year. Our ambitions are also high in terms of where we want to finish.”