Sector:
Cloud Services

Purpose:
To securely store data for the world’s leading businesses

Purpose Superpower:
Relevance

Challenge:
To stand out as bringing unique value in a field of much larger competitors

Problem:
3PAR was already a Silicon Valley success story when they came to us. Recognized by Forbes as the fourth-fastest growing tech company, it had gone public and was continuing strong at annual revenues of $194M, faring well against giant competitors such as IBM and Dell.

Despite this success, the company was viewed by the media as being “a boring company in a boring sector” where little innovation happened. Despite its growth, the company was viewed as a safe investment, but not poised for high-growth in the long-term.

Solution:
Having worked with Stuart McFaul in the past, the marketing VP hired him to build a sense of enthusiasm and excitement in the company. President Stuart McFaul conducted a series of in-depth interviews with customers, company executives and management to better define the company’s purpose. In one interview with a network storage engineer, the man off-handedly said “Well, without 3PAR, the cloud wouldn’t work.”

When Stuart dug deeper, he learned this was true: 3PAR performed the back-end processing for every major financial institution in the world. Their confidence and trust in 3PAR’s capabilities ensure every cloud-based financial transaction passes through 3PAR’s servers.

Stuart realized this fact made 3PAR deeply relevant to the tech zeitgeist as a core contributor to the success of the cloud economy. To promote this, he designed a publicity campaign with the engineer’s quote as the centerpiece: “Without 3PAR, the cloud wouldn’t work.”

Results:
The effect was almost immediate, with virtually every business and tech media outlet highlighting 3PAR’s contribution to the burgeoning cloud economy. With the coverage peaking at over 5500 articles in a single week, the media storm caught the attention of both Dell Computer and HP, which were seeking to build their investments in network storage. The companies made near-simultaneous acquisition offers to 3PAR, which kicked off a bidding war ultimately won by HP for $2.4 billion. 3PAR became part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The marketing VP later told us that this sequence of events would not have happened without the new positioning Stuart created. This sentiment was echoed by Industry blogger Dan Gilmoor, who credited 3PAR’s “brilliant” cloud positioning as a major reason for attracting the attention of the major companies. Lasting three months from start to finish, the overall program ROI was in excess of 26,000%.