In a bid to make its brand more expectable on today's market of personal computers, Dell plans to kick off advertising campaign "You Can Tell It's Dell" in the coming weeks and months. The campaign will cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

For many years Dell used to sell the most affordable and standard personal computers via the Internet or by phone directly to customers. This allowed the company to once grab the highest market share on the planet, but as the PC industry evolved, people started to want PCs that are different from the others. As a result, Dell-branded systems started to look like something cheap, standard and outdated. The consequence of this was dropping market share: today Dell is the world's third largest PC maker behind HP and Acer.

Even though Dell has been producing pretty stylish systems for years now, the brand image of the company did not evolve truly significantly. The new campaign should fix that.

“You can still be different even if you are using common components. We need to reinvigorate the brand," said Paul-Henri Ferrand, Dell's chief marketing officer, in an interview with Bloomberg news-agency.

The marketing campaign will include television spots, due to start November 6, and print ads about a week later. According to the company, the campaign would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It is unclear whether this is a multi-national or U.S.-only initiative.

The timing for such campaign seems to be right. The economy is reviving slowly and people are starting to look at products that could replace their personal computers. Some make impulsive purchases, some plan to buy something and carefully choose their technology. The campaign that differentiates Dell from other manufacturers will address both categories.

Tags: Dell, HP, Acer