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NetApp Inc.

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2013 American Business Awards

Company: NetApp Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
Entry Submitted By: Voce Communications, a Porter Novelli Company
Company Description: NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Our commitment to living our core values and consistently being recognized as a great place to work around the world are fundamental to our long-term growth and success, as well as the success of our pathway partners and customers
Nomination Category: Corporate Communications, Investor Relations, & Public Relations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications or PR Campaign of the Year - Marketing - Business-to-Business

Nomination Title: Epic Customer Campaign in conjunction with Visual Language Launch

Tell the story about this nominated campaign since January 1 2010 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

NetApp, currently a US$5.1B global company, is one of only seven high tech companies with a five year compounded annual growth rate of 20% or more. To that end, NetApp’s marketing strategy of being bold, provocative and demonstrating that storage is the foundation of success for many businesses, is a critical driver in the company’s success.

To differentiate NetApp from the competition and communicate the company’s value proposition, NetApp marketing launched a global program that, in combination with other marketing, product, and sales strategies, showcases customer success, clearly distinguishes NetApp as the industry’s innovation leader and further accelerates NetApp’s growth trajectory unlike ever before.
There were two elements included in this global program:

• Epic Stories: Unlike typical customer success stories which are solely focused on the technical aspects of a customer deployment, NetApp’s Epic Story program focuses on changing the conversation and elevating the customer story to focus on the customer’s business vs NetApp’s technology. NetApp’s three epic stories showcase customers who significantly moved their business forward or changed the lives of their customers due to their decision to build their storage foundation on NetApp.

The first Epic Story features Suncorp and demonstrates firsthand how a company's storage architecture has a direct impact on business success and the pace of innovation. The second Epic Story Thomson Reuters, showcases how technology was used to transform the way that the legal industry receives and distributes critical information. The most recent Epic Story features non-profit organization, Be The Match, and highlights how technology is used to save lives. Each Epic Story has a custom illustration to capture the key idea, a business and technical white paper to give tangible examples, and a visibility campaign on NetApp.com as well as through paid advertising, PR, and/or social media.

• Visual Language: Core brand elements (including the NetApp logo) continue to be the foundation on which NetApp’s company strategy is built —they are bold and strong and communicate the strength of an enterprise technology company. NetApp took this idea one step further by creating NetApp visual language with imagery that incorporates a very unique and own-able illustrative style.

The brand makeover was combined with a vibrant and original new visual language that is unprecedented in the storage industry and spans every element of the marketing mix. It is innovative, genuine, and reflective of NetApp’s approachable and “different” company culture, and reminiscent of a whiteboard session. With this new look and feel customers, partners, employees, and investors see NetApp as an innovation leader and as the foundation on which success is built.

The Epic Story program and new visual language achieve three goals:

(1) show that storage is foundational to business success not a “nice to have”;
(2) elevate NetApp in the conversation as the company that makes business go further, faster; and
(3) increase NetApp’s credibility with tangible examples that success is Built On NetApp.

Upload a collection of supporting files and web addresses to our server to provide more background information to the judges. You may upload any number of attachments and URLs through the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above. (Do NOT list your URLs below.)

 

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that carried out this campaign:

Christine Heckart is NetApp’s chief marketing officer. She is responsible for all aspects of NetApp’s global corporate marketing organization.

Throughout her 20-year career, Christine has played an integral role in the marketing and growth strategies of successful technology companies in the hardware, services, and technology segments of the technology industry.

A 2004 Stevie Award Winner for best marketing team, Christine is the author of two technical books and was named one of Network World’s "Top 10 Power Thinkers" and "50 Most Powerful People in the Industry." She has an economics degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.