Biz360: Lead Generation
Situation: When you invent a new product and a new category, you need good marketing. When the new product costs over $100,000 per year, you need great marketing. Biz360 invented marketing analytics, which enables the quantitative measurement of corporate communications activities. But as with many innovations, successful selling it required a time-consuming education process. And like all start-ups, time was a luxury Biz360 could not afford. Strategic Insight: Selling Biz360′s product required strong positioning, and education at...
read moreClearwire: Corporate Naming
Deploying wireless broadband is tricky, and so is communicating about it to a non-technical audience. Inter-Air Wireless turned to us to create a concise, memorable name with staying power. Our answer was “Clearwire.” They are now the largest 4G network in the United States, and expect to reach 120 million customers by the end of...
read moreCisco: Web Architecture
Nobody knows more about delivering the bits and bytes of Web content than Cisco. But when it was time to organize and refine the content of their own website, they turned to us. We helped Cisco make their website more effective by organizing key site areas around industry solutions. In the process we simplified navigation by reducing the density of unrelated links while increasing the density of related ones. We also gave it more impact by eliminating decorative images and ensuring that every picture told a part of the story. Our approach...
read moreVerio: World Domination
In 1995 the web was in its infancy. Scott Adams and Bill Nesbitt saw the potential for businesses, but recognized that most companies wouldn’t want to run their own servers. They started Hiway, one of the first web hosting businesses, from their condo in South Florida. Their challenge was delivering the complex message of outsourced web hosting to a non-technical audience while staying ahead of the competition that was sure to follow. Their CMO, Steve Umberger, engaged us to tell their story to the media and drive demand from...
read moreTrueData Partners: New Identity
TrueData Partners was a small start-up in the electronic legal discovery space. Technically smart and business agile, they were a David in a market dominated by Goliath. In order to grow their business to the next inflection point they realized they would need not only a strong identity but memorable and credible positioning. They turned to us for both. Not only was their identity weak, but none of the materials matched, leaving them with a disorganized and chaotic image. In order to rise above the noise, all of their materials...
read morei2Telecom: Building Awareness
Although it’s hard to remember now, telephone calls outside of your local area used to be very expensive, and international calling was ruinous. In 1950, a 15-minute call from New York to LA was over $30 (in 2001 dollars). Calls to London were 10 times that rate. The recent revolution in telephone pricing and capability is the result of a technical innovation called VoIP that made it possible to place calls over the Internet, bypassing phone companies altogether. With thousands of VoIP start-ups offering a dizzying array of hardware,...
read moreIDC: Product Integration
As one of the world’s leading analyst firms, IDC has significant brand equity with Wall Street and the IT Supplier community. Unfortunately, the rapid growth of the firm, combined with their breadth of product offerings, had left their product line in disarray. In order to compete in their current market and expand into other markets, IDC needed to strengthen its brand identity and improve the presentation and usability of its research content. They turned to us. Our team identified 50 different types of communications documents produced...
read moreHeidrick & Struggles: Service Innovation
Situation: Like many executive search firms in 2002, Heidrick & Struggles was battling a cyclical decline in its core business. Strategic Insight: Heidrick needed to move away from the “start-stop-start-stop” engagement model of traditional executive search firms and create a service model around continuous client engagement. Working together, we created and marketed a suite of “Leadership Services”, including interim placement, executive assessment and coaching. We then leveraged Heidrick’s unique assessment...
read moreSpikeSource: Turning a Complex Proposition into a Simple Story
SpikeSource delivers a highly technical product (verified open source stacks) to a highly technical user (the enterprise developer). But explaining the business value to VP and CIO level decisionmakers posed a challenge. Their primary objection was “Why should we pay for open source software when we can download it for free?” We crafted a brief webshow, based around the concept of “boardroom IT vs. basement IT” to explain how SpikeSource delivers business value. In the process, we showed how SpikeSource “makes...
read moreAMA: Social Media and Web 2.0
Challenge: Quickly bring marketing professionals up to speed on how to use social media and Web 2.0 to connect with customers. Solution: We created an intensive two-day course on Web 2.0 and the applications of social media. Rick Scherle has personally delivered this course to hundreds of marketing professionals around the country and has trained the American Management Association’s trainers at their regional centers in New York, Chicago and Arlington,...
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