CAMPAIGN TYPE: Media Relations
TIMEFRAME: July 2003 - March 2004
BUDGET: $100,000
Juniper Networks makes high-end networking equipment for telecom carriers, and competes head-on with Cisco, but it's not competition in the traditional sense.
In a distant second place, Juniper registers about $1 billion in revenues as compared with Cisco's $17 billion. David vs. Goliath? Hardly. Telecom is a conservative industry,
with an interest in predictability and long-term viability, so industry execs will back Goliath every time.
But in the summer of 2003 Juniper moved to change the conversation. Rather than try to demonstrate that it could compete head-on with Cisco, the company brought in PR firm
Bite Communcations, San Francisco, to position Juniper as a trailblazer in its own right.
"Our challenge was to be perceived as a thought leader and visionary, rather than just an alternate vendor of networking equipment," says Kathy Durr, Juniper's senior PR
director, who shaped the message that Cisco might be bigger but Juniper is smarter.
Led by Judy Wilks, Bite's VP, PR executives started off by talking with the usual suspects: customers, partners, and industry analysts.
The chats weren't too formal, however, just an anecdotal summation of the landscape, along with an extensive review of the current media situation.
"We wanted to position Juniper as the company that was transforming the industry," Wilks says. "Our strategy was to set the agenda and draw Cisco into our debate.
Juniper would be positioned as the nimble visionary helping telecom providers to transform their businesses while, by implication, Cisco would be characterized as the behemoth
whose only interest is in maintaining the status quo."
Some might have put Juniper's top executive front-and-center in the effort to attract media interest. But Bite took the opposite tack, cultivating a broad base of experts
within the organization.
"In a small organization, if you only have one figurehead, you are giving the impression that you are even smaller than you are," Wilks says. "To give the impression that we
are forward-thinking and visionary, we needed people to hear a number of different voices, to see that it was not just one guy pushing it forward, but an entire strong executive
bench pushing it forward."
The choice of experts fulfilled strategic needs. "The CTO [Pradeep Sindhu] already had a certain profile: People already knew his name, so we wanted to build on that," Wilks
says. "Then we chose the CIO, Kim Perdikou. She was a PR person's dream. It is novel that she is a female CIO. She also is a great spokesperson, is energetic, and has some great
ideas. So she was a perfect person to prove our point that Juniper was innovative and visionary."
To make the most of these assets, the PR plan was to have Perdikou go beyond the typical CIO landscape, casting the company in a forward-thinking light. "The traditional role
of the CIO is to run the IT aspect of an organization," Wilks says. "What Kim does is to look at the business goals of the company, and she translates those goals into what the IT
organization can do. So when she had interviews with journalists she almost never mentioned technology. She is the strategist, and that was the platform that we carved out for
her."
CEO Scott Kriens also played a leading role, stepping up as PR point man any time financial news started breaking.
When the quarterly earnings came out, for example, Kriens would talk to Business Week, the Financial Times, the New York Times and the Wall Street
Journal. He scored those interviews thanks in large measure to Bite's success in cultivating relationships with telecom reporters at said publications.
The PR effort also positioned Kriens as an industry expert, winning him invitations to comment any time Cisco put out financial statements or other announcements.
Despite the exisiting contacts, the outreach effort got off to a rocky start. "We didn't want for Scott to appear on the shows and just talk about Cisco," Wilks says. "What
we learned after doing this a few times is that we had to be very, very clear before doing these interviews that Scott would not comment directly on Cisco's earnings, but only on
the overall state of the industry. The first time around he was definitely asked questions that he would rather not have answered."
Overall, the use of broad-based executive expertise helped to garner media attention and public respect for the company. Says Durr: "We really capitalized on the expertise of
our key executives -- building platforms that positioned them as thought leaders in their own right. By doing so we demonstrated the depth of Juniper's executive bench, expanded
the number of issues we could demonstrate leadership around ... and amplified the overall message."
The results of the campaign can be measured both in terms of media attention and hard financial numbers. Kim Perdikou has been named one of Computerworld's "Premier
100 IT Leaders," and Network World Fusion has named Pradeep Sindhu one of the "50 Most Powerful People in Networking."
What's more, Scott Kriens has been profiled in BusinessWeek, San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News.
And during the last year, Juniper has continued to gain market share in a flat market. According to Synergy Research Group, Juniper's market share in the fourth
quarter of 2003 increased 43% compared with the previous quarter while Dell'Oro Q4 2003 figures show that Juniper's share in every market segment increased while Cisco's
declined. Juniper's stock price is up about 150% in the last year.
While still running a distant second to Cisco, Juniper's PR strategy of touting its own expertise has given the firm s stronger foothold in the hyper- competitive tech
market.
Contacts: Kathy Durr, 408.745.5058, [email protected]; Judy Wilks, 415.365.0390, [email protected]
Juniper Aligns
Juniper's stock price has reflected the steady influence of a PR campaign aimed at raising the company's public profile:
| November 2003 | $18.87 |
| May 2004 | $20.95 |
| November 2004 | $28.50 |
At the same time, interest in Juniper's networking products has led to rising revenue.
| Quarter ending Dec. 31, 2003: | $206,955 |
| Quarter ending Sept. 30, 2004: | $375,014 |