Foster-Redmond » Video

The Ninth Rule of Fight Club

Foster-Redmond — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:32:12 +0000

The IT industry’s so full of it (jargon, that is). From company naming to technologies and product lines, all their best stuff is hidden behind acronyms. SAN. SaaS. APT’s. SEI. VDI. WAP. HP. EMC. 4G. VOIP. It’s like that scene in Fight Club, where everything blends together, where nothing’s real. And everything is a copy, of a copy, of a copy.

So very unlike fast-moving storage tech player Xiotech

Under its new corporate leadership and our direction as AOR, they’ve bravely (and wisely) dumped the jargon in favor of new, powerfully simplified messaging. Instead of acronyms, just a straightforward promise to help customers run their storage enterprise and applications better…saving them tons of money. Isn’t that what it should be about? Explaining what’s in it for them, instead of blathering on all about us?

Still not convinced? Think about virtualization. Everybody’s sort of heard about it, but most people don’t really get it…it’s a hype category and the manufacturers are throwing a blizzard of confusion at customers. If you can find someone on this Earth that can distill it down to a core value prop better than our Xiotech thought leaders Steve Sicola and Rob Peglar, drinks are on us.

And there you have the ninth rule of Fight Club, the one that wasn’t in the movie — say what you mean, mean what you say. Preferably, in plain English.

Heroes aren’t born, they’re built

Foster-Redmond — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 13:28:33 +0000

As a big provider of complex virtualization infrastructure software, VMware can be sort of hard to get your head around. The official brand and product storytelling is a blur of amazing facts about how they support a range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructures. How their VMware vSphere platform helps companies along the path of cloud computing by providing compatible IT infrastructures, and so on…

Fortunately, we’ve had the opportunity to help them do some unofficial brand storytelling too.

The simplification of anything is always sensational

Foster-Redmond — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 05:42:50 +0000

The thing about even the greatest tech companies is that they can get hamstrung in their own jargon, making them really hard to understand and relate to. Our longtime client SAP even coined a formal name for this tendency – “SAPanese” – as a reminder to themselves to always beware falling into the pattern of reciting buzzwords rather than simply communicating how you can help your customers.

Enter Xiotech. They work in the storage and virtualization space. Try to think of a more abstract idea to market than “virtualization” (by definition, it’s not even “real”).

As part of a complete company rebrand and relaunch we led just a few months ago, we worked with top Xiotech management and technology execs to distill all of the company’s messaging, including the too-complex virtualization message, down to a set of core statements that have real value for customers. We think the video below featuring Xiotech’s CTO, Steve Sicola, illustrates this approach nicely.

By simplifying what it says, and saying more every week, the company has set itself on the path to some very big things.

[See post to watch Flash video]

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