Influencer Relations Rebuilds Confidence

and Brand Through Vision and Consistency

ISILON CASE STUDY

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SummaryOnce 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.

Dave Raffo - Journalist,Search Storage, April 2008

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.

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SituationIn 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

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

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.

However, perceptions of the “old Isilon” continued to linger.

They weakened the company’s standing among potential

customers, who rightfully

found little to like in Isilon’s

reputation and doubted

the company’s long-term

viability. These perceptions

also had a significant impact

on industry journalists and analysts, who had closely

observed, and in many cases chronicled themselves, the

company’s meteoric rise and near-fatal fall. With a brilliant

young founder returned to the CEO’s office, its corporate

house now well in order and a refreshed product lineup

ready to be sold, the company’s chief obstacles to success

was be its damaged credibility and poor reputation. Adding

to the challenge, Isilon’s brand awareness had significant

room for growth, as studies later confirmed.

The company had new management, new products and a fresh commitment. Now, time to purge perceptions of the “old Isilon.”

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StrategyWith 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 primary vehicle to boost awareness and preference.

But with market perception still highly unfavorable,

McBru recommended a longer-term perspective and

a higher-level message. Rather than depend solely on

a technology story to woo back a disgruntled industry,

McBru saw an opportunity for a

broad-based influencer relations

program focused on delivering

an aggressive new vision and

product innovations for the

company and the industry.

As pioneers of scale-out storage, Isilon could assert its

insight into the factors driving the marketplace – the

explosion of digital data foremost among them – and

how its products outpaced the competition in addressing

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.

ExecutionThe 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.

Messaging was an important element of executing against

the strategy. McBru constructed a core platform, including

business, category leadership and go-to-market messages

aligned to customers and purchasing influencers from

After crafting the strategy and core platform, McBru conducted briefings, launches and a tour for top influencers.

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the CIO level to junior level storage administrators. That

platform served as a touchstone for all press- and public-

facing materials.

The team’s first opportunity to put the strategy to the

test came quickly, as Isilon was poised to announce

several new products. McBru directed and implemented

a product launch that illustrated how the strategy would

be executed over the long term. The launch 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

demonstrating its execution against vision. The launch’s

role in manifesting the visionary strategy hinged on:

Hitting the reset button – the presentations to press

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

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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.

ResultsBased 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.

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In the time since Feb. 2009, Isilon marked a host of major

milestones. The company was placed in the Leaders’

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.

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.

From mired to acquired, McBru helped Isilon drive up share prices 10X, leading to a big acquisition by EMC.

Isilon Stock Price

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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,

margins and profit through Q3 2010. And while its share

price was moribund at the $2 level in early 2009, as of Oct.

2010 the company’s shares had surpassed $29. Before

the end of that year, the company reached its ultimate

business objective when it was acquired by storage giant

EMC Corp. for $2.25 billion, or $33.85 per share.

Obviously, tremendous credit for Isilon’s story goes to

the visionary leaders and hard-working sales, marketing

and operations professionals whose dedication and effort

saw the company through its

darkest hours to earn its greatest

successes. Isilon was able to shed

the lingering effects of its public

failings, establish a leadership

position in the market, and achieve

a remarkably lucrative outcome for its investors – and

for that, credit belongs to a disciplined communications

strategy. McBru helped Isilon develop and convey a vision

of a company that thinks beyond products, problems, and

the here and now and instead points toward a future in

which its business model and customer focus leads an

ever-growing market.

McBru helped Isilon develop and convey a new vision that pointed to a rich future.

elise@mcbru.com

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www.mcbrublog.com

@mcbru

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