McBru-casestudy-Isil..

CASE STUDY
Influencer Relations Rebuilds
Confidence and Brand Through
Vision and Consistency
When things looked bleakest, Isilon turned to
McBru – together we steered toward a bright,
profitable business position and outcome.
Summary
Once a darling of Wall Street, data storage systems provider
Isilon had weathered several blows to its business and
credibility when the company engaged McClenahan Bruer
in February 2009. With game-changing new products
in the pipeline and its leadership team rejuvenated,
Isilon was more than ready to open a new chapter in its
checkered history. Customers and influencers would need
to be convinced.
Working together, Isilon’s precise business execution
and McBru’s disciplined strategy for communicating
a vision eliminated lingering doubt in the market. The
effort spawned an unbroken string of positive coverage
in national business weeklies including the Wall Street
Journal, and drove stock prices up tenfold, and set the
stage for a highly visible acquisition.
Situation
In late 2006, Isilon recorded the best opening for a
technology IPO since 2000 as its shares rose 77 percent
on the company’s first day as a public venture.
Unfortunately for the company and its shareholders, there
would be little good news in the two years that followed.
Through 2007 and into 2008, internal auditing and an
“
Isilon’s problems aren’t over…
it must restore confidence among
customers at a time when it faces
much more competition than it did
a year ago.
”
Dave Raffo - Journalist,
Search Storage, April 2008
SEC investigation found overstated revenues. A threat of
delisting from NASDAQ was followed by a restatement of
earnings, which showed much of the company’s reported
sales momentum to have been a work of fiction. Legal
action from the SEC and a class action from shareholders
soon followed. The company’s once-heralded position
as a disruptive innovator in the IT marketplace had
been replaced with perceptions of ineptness and poor
governance – if not outright malfeasance.
Under these trying circumstances, Isilon founder and
former CTO Sujal Patel took over as CEO in October 2007
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and proceeded to clean house. Eleven top executives
were replaced. The corporate culture was infused with
a wholesale commitment to innovating market-leading
storage products in anticipation of customer needs – Patel
often spoke of the company’s “insane customer focus.” A
raft of well-targeted new products filled the R&D pipeline,
positioning Isilon to grow its business beyond traditional
niches and dramatically increasing the company’s total
available market.
Strategy
With the business still feeling the effects of its prior
missteps and its share price hovering at the $2.00 level,
Isilon came to McBru for strategy and tactics to take its
new, positive direction to market. When strategic planning
began, the company saw its strengthened product roadmap
and a considerable investment in sales infrastructure as
its key assets to winning back a skeptical marketplace.
Both parties agreed that
influencer relations would be
The company had new management, new
However, perceptions of the
the primary vehicle to boost
products and a fresh commitment. Now, time
“old Isilon” continued to
awareness and preference.
to
purge
perceptions
of
the
“old
Isilon.”
linger. They weakened the
But with market perception
company’s standing among
still highly unfavorable,
potential customers, who rightfully found little to like in
McBru recommended a longer-term perspective and
Isilon’s reputation and doubted the company’s long-term
a higher-level message. Rather than depend solely on
viability. These perceptions also had a significant impact
a technology story to woo back a disgruntled industry,
on industry journalists and analysts, who had closely
McBru saw an opportunity for a broad-based influencer
observed, and in many cases chronicled themselves, the
relations program focused on delivering an aggressive new
company’s meteoric rise and near-fatal fall. With a brilliant
vision and product innovations for the company and the
young founder returned to the CEO’s office, its corporate
industry.
house now well in order and a refreshed product lineup
ready to be sold, the company’s chief obstacles to success
As pioneers of scale-out storage, Isilon could assert its
was be its damaged credibility and poor reputation. Adding
insight into the factors driving the marketplace – the
to the challenge, Isilon’s brand awareness had significant
explosion of digital data foremost among them – and
room for growth, as studies later confirmed.
how its products outpaced the competition in addressing
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market trends. Its first-mover position showed a prescient
anticipation of the ways in which digital media consumption
would change how enterprises must store, manage and
make use of data. The successful return of a founder to
the CEO’s office underscored the notion that the company
had started down a singular path to success that others
struggled to match. The strategy was quickly agreed
upon: Isilon would embark on a comprehensive influencer
relations program, aggressively targeting industry media
and analysts with a revealing, long-term vision for the
company, its business and its technology.
Execution
The strategy was executed with a goal of infusing all
press materials and influencer interactions with the
Isilon vision. This vision would serve to unify and give
context to business- and marketing-level messages, being
deployed in addition to, rather than at the expense of,
those messages.
from the CIO level to junior level storage administrators.
That platform served as a touchstone for all press- and
public-facing materials.
After crafting the strategy and core
Messaging was an important
The team’s first opportunity to put the
platform,
McBru
conducted
briefings,
element
of
executing
strategy to the test came quickly, as
launches
and
a
tour
for
top
influencers.
against the strategy. McBru
Isilon was poised to announce several
constructed a core platform,
new products. McBru directed and
including business, category leadership and go-to-market
implemented a product launch that illustrated how the
messages aligned to customers and purchasing influencers
strategy would be executed over the long term. The launch
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demonstrating its execution against vision. The launch’s
role in manifesting the visionary strategy hinged on:
•Hitting the reset button – the presentations to press
targeted key media and analysts from across IT and
vertical industry media, as well as a long list of industry
analysts, for face-to-face, pre-launch briefings as part
of a road tour to major press centers in the U.S. McBru
targeted a “who’s who” list of key influencers in IT media
and analysts, with an emphasis on those who had visibly
soured on Isilon. Patel joined the tour to lead many of the
briefings personally.
The tour was the ideal opportunity to bring disaffected
journalists and analysts back to the table and reinvigorate
those relationships by laying out Isilon’s roadmap and
would explicitly acknowledge Isilon’s past missteps, the
organizational and policy changes made to correct them,
and the company’s commitment to moving forward.
•Level-setting the business story – Offering an in-depth
understanding of the state of Isilon’s business would
provide a platform for demonstrating future success
and execution against the business model. Share of
market segments, goals for business and category
growth, and market opportunity for new products were
up for discussion.
•Laying claim to the future – the launch briefings went
to great lengths to educate influencers on Isilon’s
first-mover position in scale-out storage and its early
bet on unstructured data as the wave of the future,
including an assemblage of proof points as to how
the market was poised to meet Isilon’s direction. With
that context in place, Isilon clearly communicated its
business objectives, including specific timeframes and
deliverables on its product roadmap. These become the
milestones to which the influencer relations program
could return, time and again, to demonstrate Isilon’s
execution and the prescience of its vision.
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Results
Based on coverage alone, Isilon and McBru’s first product
press tour was a great success, outstripping the results from
any of the company’s prior launches. More importantly,
the success it achieved in resetting relationships with
key influencers served to conclusively put their negative
perceptions of Isilon on hold, allowing the company the
precious opportunity to prove itself against the aggressive
expectations it had set
forth. And the company
executed,
marking
milestone after milestone
against the roadmap to
which it had laid claim.
The Isilon communications
team
leveraged
those
milestones, including key
product and business news
opportunities, to continue
conveying Isilon’s vision and extend it forward. At the
same time, McBru continually seeded the core messages
supporting that vision through ongoing influencer relations
and social media programs.
In the time since Feb. 2009, Isilon marked a host of major
milestones. The company was placed in the Leaders’
Isilon Stock Price
From mired to acquired, McBru helped Isilon drive up share prices
10X, leading to a big acquisition by EMC.
quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for network
attached storage providers, heralding its competitiveness
with
companies
including IBM and
EMC. In Feb. 2010, the
company
announced
Q4 2009 as the first
profitable quarter in
its nine-year history
for which it earned
coverage across local
and national business press, including The Wall Street
Journal – Isilon’s first positive press in such outlets in
nearly three years.
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Indeed, McBru’s analysis of the media coverage showed
overwhelmingly positive viewpoints about the company
in 2009 and 2010, whereas 2007 and 2008 had seen
negative stories arrive by the dozen. Moreover, during the
course of the McBru influencer relations program, the agency
measured dramatic improvement in both the volume and
the tone of coverage from journalists across the spectrum
– while coverage in early 2009 was largely neutral in tone,
coverage in 2010 shows a significant uptick in journalists’
affinity for the company and its visionary messages.
The company’s execution against its stated vision fueled
other, much more salient benefits as well. Isilon exceeded
expectations with quarter-over-quarter growth in revenue,
operations professionals whose dedication and effort saw
margins and profit through Q3 2010. And while its share
the company through its darkest hours to earn its greatest
price was moribund at the $2 level in early 2009, as of
successes. Isilon was able to shed the lingering effects of its
Oct. 2010 the company’s shares
public failings, establish a leadership
had surpassed $29. Before the
position in the market, and achieve a
McBru helped Isilon develop and
end of that year, the company
remarkably lucrative outcome for its
convey
a
new
vision
that
pointed
reached its ultimate business
investors – and for that, credit belongs
to
a
rich
future.
objective when it was acquired by
to a disciplined communications
storage giant EMC Corp. for $2.25
strategy. McBru helped Isilon develop
billion, or $33.85 per share.
and convey a vision of a company that thinks beyond
products, problems, and the here and now and instead
Obviously, tremendous credit for Isilon’s story goes to the
points toward a future in which its business model and
visionary leaders and hard-working sales, marketing and
customer focus leads an ever-growing market.
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CONTACT US
www.mcbru.com
www.mcbrublog.com
@mcbru
McClenahan-Bruer
5331 SW Macadam Ave
Suite #220
Portland, OR 97239
503.546.1000
www.mcbru.com
Kerry McClenahan
CEO
direct: 503.546.1002
mobile: 503.789.8525
kerry@mcbru.com