Butler Group: Improving brand reputation and corporate image
The worst fate to befall a poet, said French artist and writer Jean Cocteau, is to be admired through being misunderstood. Businesses cannot thrive in such circumstances either. When IT analyst company Butler Group turned to Hotwire to reposition the company, it was widely misunderstood among its key audiences. Research conducted by Hotwire revealed the firm was perceived as lacking independence, too heavily focused on specific technologies, and the media ranked it as the sixth most popular analyst house for sourcing information and quotes.With a brief that covered brand reputation and corporate image, Hotwire devised a campaign strategy that would alter perceptions of the company radically and allow the management to resume command of its entire external positioning.
The campaign strategy had several elements. The first stage addressed the media misconceptions as identified in the research. A round of intensive strategic briefings with tier one media such as IT Week, Computer Weekly, FT, The Guardian and Management Today, set out to establish a correct and full understanding of Butler Group. Briefing topics included Butler Group’s strategy and areas of expertise so that the media would view the organisation as a valuable source of information, particularly when sourcing quotes.
The second stage involved working with several Butler Group analysts to identify hot issues and trends. This was to be a powerful component of the campaign using Hotwire’s proprietary tool, the Issues Factory, which allows companies to take an issues-based approach to PR. Compliance was a major issue among several identified.
One of the most high-profile tactics involved issue jumping. For example, Hotwire identified two major issues in advance: the report by the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group on the Computer Misuse Act and the second reading of the Companies Bill. On both occasions, Hotwire prepared media alerts and pitched to the press before, during and after events achieving significant coverage in top-tier technology media, including IT Week and Computer Weekly. This targeting of the important technology trade media was supplemented by a programme of supporting Butler Group’s research and symposia events.
One of the key misconceptions was that the company was perceived as being too close to the vendors with the consequence that Butler Group analysis was viewed as being ‘bought’ and therefore not objective. By arranging breakfast seminars with PR agencies and in-house analysts and conducting strategic briefings with the press, Hotwire enabled the company to state categorically that this was not true.
The year-long campaign led to a 213% increase in coverage of Butler Group. The pre-campaign research conducted by Hotwire ranked Butler Group equal sixth place when business and trade journalists were asked to name the top five analyst houses from whom they like to source quotes or information. Following the campaign by Hotwire the company leapt into second place.
In one of the strongest reflections of the campaign’s success, Butler Group was acquired by former rival Datamonitor on 31 January 2005 and the former Butler Group Chairman Peter Harkness was made a Non-Executive Director of Datamonitor.
Peter Harkness said: “Butler Group relied upon Hotwire’s expertise when developing our strategy for this campaign. The results speak for themselves. Butler Group identifies the hot topics people face in their business. Compliance was a major issue and we wanted our company to be closely associated with the issue in the media and to have the names of our analysts better known. These aims were well-achieved, and many of our analysts are now household names in the IT space.”
