The Lenovo Moto brand won’t be a major focus of Motorola Mobility going forward, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Jan Huckfeldt suggested on Thursday at the Moto Z2 Play launch event. While speaking to a crowd of consumers and journalists in Brazil earlier this week, Huckfeldt talked about the process of building a strong brand and stressed the importance of getting the “fundamentals” right, adding how the Motorola brand is still extremely popular in the Latin American country. “We are all in and fully focused on – Motorola,” the company’s executive said, implying how the Lenovo Moto brand will be partially or completely replaced by Motorola branding in the near future.
Refer to the video beneath this writing to hear Huckfeldt talk about that change in brand strategy; the relevant part starts around the 1:00 mark. It’s currently unclear whether the newly announced Moto Z2 Play will mark the start of the company’s new promotional efforts as the prototype units of the device only carried the familiar Moto branding on their top bezels. Regardless, the launch event itself featured a lot of Motorola branding, implying that the company is now once again ready to embrace its historic name that took a backseat to the streamlined Moto brand after Lenovo acquired the Libertyville, Illinois-based consumer electronics manufacturer from Google in late 2014.
Even if the Lenovo Moto brand becomes a thing of the past in the coming months, the same won’t hold true for the main Lenovo name in the context of its handset division, with Lenovo Group Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Yang Yuanqing recently saying that the Chinese tech giant will “never” discontinue the Lenovo phone brand in favor of Motorola. The latest turn of events comes shortly after Lenovo said that its phone manufacturing unit is set to return to profit in the near future, which is something that it didn’t manage to accomplish since Motorola Mobility joined Lenovo Group’s family. Apart from the Moto Z2 Play, Motorola is expected to launch half a dozen other smartphones spanning numerous price points by the end of the year in an effort to improve its performance in the increasingly competitive smartphone market.