Sage Communications

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Panasonic / ITC Global

Situation / Challenge

ITC Global in 2018 faced a rapidly transforming satellite services ecosystem dominated by nearly constant M&A activity. While ownership churn was good news to investors, it came at the cost of service quality: over-subscribed and under-engineered satcom networks that lacked redundancy or true global coverage, thinly supported by a revolving door of sales and technical talent. At the same time, satcom customers increasingly expected broadband-level performance at the network edge to support not just high-cost remote operations but also difficult-to-recruit remote personnel.

It was a gap that ITC Global (itself recently acquired by Panasonic) and its robust engineering abilities was uniquely equipped to solve – but how to cut through this M&A clutter enough to make a difference? Enter Sage.

Approach

At Sage, we worked with ITC Global leadership to develop a drumbeat thought-leadership, demand-generation, and event-management campaign that used the Satellite 2019 tradeshow (SatShow) as its pivot point.

We developed a series of thought-leadership themes that spoke to key ITC Global differentiators. These included:

  • Commitment to deliver on service promises;

  • A culture of partnership and problem solving;

  • Proactive provisioning across a truly global network

  • Industry-leading availability thanks to with redundant beam coverage; and

  • Sustainable near-broadband speeds regardless of service area.

We tied each differentiator to the most pressing operational issues in ITC Global’s target verticals, creating more strategic customer conversations that weren’t just about speeds-and-feeds.

Prior to SatShow, we seeded these themes across those targets in both paid and organic social media, directing interest to a special ITC Global microsite that drew clear links between these themes and customer operational impacts.

We then made these themes the central appeal of ITC Global’s main booth. Motion and static graphics at varying heights incented SatShow visitors to gauge their network expectations through a “Network Net Worth” test that evaluated network performance along six criteria – the same criteria raised in our themes and used by ITC Global to qualify prospects. We supported this test with both a white paper and sales brochure that fleshed out ITC Global’s technical differentiators.

Finally, we continued our paid and organic social media outreach after SatShow to build additional buzz and amplify the customer contacts ITC Global made during the show.