Situation

At the time we began working with Polycom, the company’s starfish-shaped conference telephone had 90% market share and it was readying itself to enter the video conferencing market through its acquisition of Via Video. We came in on the ground floor to help them through the positioning and branding issues they faced as well as to make a big splash for a combined company determined to "break the price barrier on video conferencing."

Objectives

• Define and own a new category of "group conferencing anytime, from anywhere" at an affordable price
  
• Make Polycom the market leader of affordable business quality video conferencing
  
• Give special support to channel integration
  

Special Connections

• During our five year relationship we helped build the foundations of the entire conferencing category, from phone to video to broadband network access products
  
• We worked closely with analysts covering several categories (mobile, telephony, video, broadband) to help guide their points of view on a converged environment
  
• We greatly leveraged founder and CEO Brian Hinman into a broad range of conference keynotes and business and trade feature coverage. Hinman was a natural spokesperson because he had founded PictureTel and then went on to start the company that would break PictureTel’s price structure, and eventually acquire it.
  
• We created a reference center for media to help them understand all the opportunities and needs surrounding group conferencing so that they could cover this emerging new category easily and expertly.
  
• We recruited a circle of meeting and communications dynamics third party experts to help bring the benefits of group conferencing to life at the workplace user level.
  
• We injected video conferencing into current news and trend stories by providing units for use by military and their families, zoo directors evaluating animal swapping needs and other innovative uses of the technology.
  
• We worked with Polycom’s channel partners to create "total solution" customer case histories for the trades even though products were sold through three separate channels.

Results

• During our five year relationship, Polycom grew from a $50 million telephone maker to a $500 million group conferencing leader about to acquire PictureTel
  
• Company stock during our relationship moved from $8 to $80 per share
  
• CEO Brian Hinman hired us again when he founded 2Wire