CHALLENGE:

What is in a name? In fact, it is a crucial business decision, and one that Hewlett Packard did not take lightly as it was deciding whether its family of system management software plug-ins should adopt the “Essentials” moniker already being used by one of the company’s server groups. “We needed to know whether it would be good to leverage the term ‘Essentials’ for system management plug ins more broadly,” said Ute Albert, Worldwide Marketing Manager for the HP Virtual Server Environment, at Hewlett Packard Co. in Cupertino, Calif. “The task was to evaluate what mileage we could get out of it, consider what naming conventions we might use, and make sure we identified the software products that would be part of the family name.”

The company, knowing that it needed to move fast and didn’t have the internal resources to meet its deadline, turned to Lawren Communications, a marketing communications consultant firm, to provide an outside perspective to ensure that all the involved groups were in agreement. “We needed to get buy in from management of all the project groups about whether it made sense to move forward,” said Albert. “There were multiple groups to work with, and each owned a different product that was impacted by this new naming convention.”

SOLUTION:

Albert asked her network for a recommendation and interviewed Celia Lawren. “We knew a contractor could address the flexibility we needed,” said Albert. “Celia had a lot of experience in the marketing communications space. She was also good at driving the project forward, while ensuring that everyone stayed on track, politely but in a strong way.”

As part of the project, Lawren built a team of employees who supported more than 30 different plug-ins that could potentially adopt the new product family name. She also coordinated with the server groups that were already using the name. The team explored the impact that adopting a new naming convention would have on its Web presence, collateral materials and other business actions. “It was a large virtual team, with lots of different products and, accordingly, many connections,” said Albert. “She mastered the content immediately and had the project management and people skills to drive the whole team forward. In addition, her clear, crisp communication and writing skills definitely showed.”

In bringing these skills to bear, Lawren was able to finish the project within extremely tight deadlines. “The project was on a fast track and Celia managed to finish in three months, including the necessary naming and background checks,” said Albert, adding that Lawren even had time to test the proposed naming conventions with several audiences.

The results of the research showed that HP would get good synergies from adopting the unified product line naming convention. “Now we have consistent names for our plug-ins,” said Albert. “We also have internal naming convention guidelines that clearly documents how the new name should be used. It was an absolutely successful project.”