MarketingMasters Luncheon Seminar
The Inspiration Behind Tellabs’ ‘New Life’ Campaign
SPEAKER:Savvy business marketers know that if you can’t outspend your competition, you have to outsmart your competition. Find out how Tellabs is using that strategy against its telecom industry rivals when Mike O’Malley keynotes BMA’s MarketingMasters Luncheon Seminar on Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009, at The Standard Club.
O’Malley is director of external marketing at Tellabs, a 30-plus-year-old company that for years had been known as one of North America’s leading manufacturers of switching equipment for telecom service providers. And for a time, that was a comfortable position. But as technology evolved and the telecommunications business expanded globally, so did the competition. Tellabs wasn’t content to remain a regional leader in a niche field. It wanted to diversify its products and services and market them on a global scale.
Impeding that effort was the perception that Tellabs was an old-fashioned company that sold products, not solutions, at a time when its competitors—global goliaths such as Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco and Nokia Siemens—were seen as industry leaders and innovators.
Tellabs has been working to change that perception. In recent years, the company has rolled out a suite of new solutions, including:
- Tellabs® Mobile Backhaul Solutions, enabling mobile operators to save while offering new products and services
- Tellabs® Carrier Ethernet Solutions, providing customized individual data services for each customer
- Tellabs® Optical Networking Solutions, offering innovations in optical networking to address changing bandwidth needs
- Tellabs® Multiservice Edge Solutions, supporting multiple services customized according to the customer or service type
- Tellabs® Fiber Access Solutions, delivering broadband to every home and business its customers serve
- Tellabs® Global Services, providing consultation, design and managed services
It was O’Malley’s task to communicate to the company’s service provider customers that Tellabs has the best solutions to help them deliver high-quality voice, video and data services over wireline and wireless networks around the world. That’s was a tall order, considering Tellabs had been considered “a tier-two player in the land of giants,” O’Malley said.
“We need to do things differently and effectively outsmart—not outspend—our competitors” O’Malley said. “We don’t beat them by going head to head, we beat them by doing things from a marketing standpoint that are different so that we can stand out.”
O’Malley and his team came up with a way to make Tellabs stand out after noting that many of Tellabs’ new solutions were intertwined with newly emerging technologies.
“Our customers were struggling to predict what business and consumer products and services were needed to drive new revenues. Tellabs helped by researching the communication needs of ‘echo boomers,’ the children of the baby boomers and often the first movers on new technologies,” he said. “They’re the largest generation in the last 50 years and they’re also the first generation that has never known the world without a PC, without cable television and without a mobile phone.”
From that realization sprouted “Inspire the New Life,” a marketing campaign that is appropriately dominated by digital media. O’Malley said the campaign is designed to convince its customers that it understands their needs better than the competition because it knows who the next generation of end users are.
“To prove that we understood that group better than anyone, we went out and found five echo boomers, five young users, that demonstrated the communication needs of the coming generation,” O’Malley explained. The five included a rapper in Chicago who was also a Flash developer; a video blogger from Pasadena, Calif.; and a couple of young entrepreneurs who started an online business with 20 employees, none of whom they had ever even met.
O’Malley and his team developed video documentaries to profile these boomers and relate how Tellabs solutions are designed to meet the significant needs of these users. These videos are up on the “Inspire the New Life” Web site and are an integral part of the ongoing campaign, along with a blog, audio and video podcast series, and microsites in different languages.
“We did those type of echo-boomer profiles to pull those people out and say, ‘Here are real examples of real people that live and work around the world, and they’re examples of the future of your business,” O’Malley said.
“Inspire the New Life” appears to be inspiring a global audience for Tellabs. In the third quarter of this year, Tellabs generated 38% of its revenue outside North America, and of the 3,300 people Tellabs employs, about 1,150 are based outside the United States. What’s more, 41 of the world’s top 50 telecom service providers use Tellabs equipment to advance their networks and deliver new services.
About Mike O'Malley
Mike O’Malley is director of external marketing at Tellabs, which offers solutions that enable telecom service providers to deliver high-quality voice, video and data services over wireline and wireless networks around the world.
In this role, O’Malley is responsible for application marketing, business case development, and product and market segmentation across the entire Tellabs product portfolio.
Previously, O’Malley held a variety of positions in marketing, product management and product planning across Tellabs’ data, access and transport products. Prior to his current position, O’Malley held domestic and international marketing positions across Tellabs’ IP/MPLS, VOIP, SONET, DWDM, digital cross-connect and cable telephony products.
O’Malley has more than 12 years of telecommunications industry experience and holds a Master of Business Administration degree, a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois.
Sponsored by:
