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Cisco Broadens Its brand position

Over a period of 28 years, Cisco built one of the most powerful and valuable global brands selling networking gear to very specific buyers — the chief information officer down to the network manager. But as the traditional IT budget began to fragment, and Cisco’s portfolio of products and services began to grow, the company sensed an opportunity to expand its business by focusing on new buying centers. That sparked a new brand conversation two years ago, in support of a shift in Cisco’s corporate strategy to target additional enterprise executives and line-of-business leaders.

“We have a lot of equity in our networking business, and we have brought that into our new brand conversation,” says Blair Christie, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Cisco, which turned 30 this year. “But at the same time, we have painted a picture of the future that would be relevant to a new set of buyers. Because we’re selling solutions to broader segments of a business, we have broadened our position.”

Christie, a featured speaker at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, Oct. 15-18 in Orlando, Fla., discusses the transformation at Cisco, the challenges that have come with it, how the company is engaging customers, and more.

Q. What insight prompted the change in Cisco’s corporate strategy, and how has it benefitted the brand and your customers?

A. Cisco, as a whole, has been on a constant journey. We’ve always pushed into what we call “tornado markets” — markets that move fast. These markets have at least one foot in the networking space, but over the past few years, it’s not just the technology markets that have shifted; we also saw a shift in business models and how our customers would consume what we offer. For years, if you wanted routing capabilities, or collaboration capabilities, you bought hardware or equipment that would sit on your site. But then we started to see value in providing those services to customers from the cloud.

We could deliver networking capabilities through software, as opposed to something that needed to be on a piece of hardware. That’s a consumption change for our customers, and it has huge ramifications on their operating expenses, on their capital budgets, and so forth. This shift also had huge implications on how we develop and go to market at Cisco. We decided to move away from the consumer markets we participated in, even though that was an important piece of our brand strategy at the time.

We refocused on enterprise customers, ensuring that we understood their business needs and new consumption models. As a result, we are bringing new value to them through innovation. We needed to make sure that our brand reflected where the company was going. 

We’re seeing our wallet share grow, even with our largest customers. That is definitely reflective of the fact that we’re selling into new areas, with new buyers, and offering new solutions. We’re also seeing great results in our brand metrics, which specifically show that our customers view us as a strategic partner, not simply as a networking vendor, and have confidence in our ability to uniquely deliver on the promise of the “Internet of Everything.” Most importantly, we’re seeing the highest growth come from new areas of our business — data center, new software, applications, specific infrastructure, and our consulting services.



Source: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/235155/cisco-broadens-its-brand-position.html

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