BACKGROUND:
The company, Solid Information Technologies, sells embedded systems (i.e. hardware with firmware embedded into it) to major telecommunications infrastructure companies like Siemens, Alcatel, NEC and Avaya, who install them into every cell phone tower and telecommunications hub. This is “heavy equipment” that simply cannot fail, hence reliability and fail-over/redundancy is the major technology claim.

Rocket Science was brought in 6 weeks before a major tradeshow called SuperComm to help the company make a splash – the company had just been recapitalized and if this show failed, the investors were ready to fold.

STRATEGY:
The key differentiation for Solid’s products (and every other competitor) was “carrier-grade reliability.” The phrase was so over-used that it had lost any meaning, and so we sat down to think of a way to re-cast what ‘five-nines reliability’ and ’50 millisecond failover’ really means to a customer. The product engineer explained that such rapid fail-over technology allows a switch to experience catastrophic failure anywhere in the stack as many as 5,000 times before you would notice any performance degradation. So a lot can go wrong and nobody gets fired. Hence we created our ‘5000 Lives’ lead-gen/fulfillment campaign as a tease to get press & customers to inquire further.

> Pre-Show Lead-Generation to Drive Traffic to the Booth:
We decided to send out two waves of eMail promotions to all registered tradeshow attendees. Wave#1 was a pitch that ‘Solid’s technology will save your job/company 5,000 times’ and we can give you ‘5,000 reasons to build your hardware stack using Solid’s embedded systems.’ The html eMail looked like this (Wave #1):

The next eMail promotion (Wave #2) was sent out a week later, and we offered 5 give-away prizes – which were 5,000-song iPods, of course:

The third step was another eMail invitation, but this time sent only to 200 targeted companies, inviting them to “help us consume 5,000 olives” at our hospitality event (the invitation followed a similar visual theme as the email blasts above).

> Booth Fulfillment:
When attendees arrived at the tradeshow, the pre-show marketing campaign was carried on visually in a couple of ways:

1) Solid’s marketing person found a sweet deal on a last-minute ad space in one of the show daily magazines, so we developed this ad:

2) Solid’s business development person coordinated with 17 other companies who were exhibiting at the show to display a sign featuring our ‘5000’ image. Each of these companies represented a complimentary technology to Solid’s, and we educated them on what the ‘5000’ meant and how to direct people to the Solid booth. This expanded our visual presence to a total of 18 different booths and unofficially enlisted an extra team of sales people to push traffic to our booth. Here is the template that we created for them to display:

3) Solid hosted the party with 5000 olives and gave away the 5000-song iPods. We held the party in Solid’s trade show booth immediately after the show floor closed, but before the start of an Intel party that was off location. So many people tried to come to the party that we had to rope off the booth with velvet ropes and have the show security checking for invitations. EVERYONE was talking about the Solid party the next day.

POST-SHOW FOLLOW-THROUGH:
With so little time to prepare before the show, we were not able to sit down with every sales person and specify exactly what sort of follow-up letters they were to send. But we felt strongly that Sales should carry through the theme of the show and do so promptly. So we ended up supplying them with two basic templates: one for eMail follow-up notes and one for printed letters. Both templates used the come-on of ‘5000 reasons to consider Solid’ and used the same bouncing-cat-with-orange-numbers image.