Marketing Challenge: Creating a New Category and Becoming the Leader

The Company that Blazed a New Trail

Cerebyte, Inc. established leadership by defining and extending the knowledge management market. It provided powerful software technology that allows organizations to capture expertise that resides across all areas. The company's innovative software harvests the knowledge and expertise of a company, stores it in an archive and commercializes best practices, allowing organizations to generate new revenues, extend their brand identity, increase productivity and reinforce their market leadership. Founded by a Stanford PhD, Cerebyte's direct sales to more than 100 companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix, provided growing market validation of the company's revolutionary approach to better accessing an organization's intellectual capital.

Situation
The idea for Cerebyte, Inc. began as a thesis for the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The founder and CEO, took project management software and turned it into the next generation of knowledge management software at a time when intellectual capital management software was just beginning to emerge. Intellectual capital was not well understood by the media, analysts or potential customers. The software enables a company to keep, store, buy or sell its knowledge and decision making capabilities. Cerebyte needed to increase awareness of a new product concept, establish a technology leading brand identity and gain support with third party expert firms to create demand with potential customers and generate sales.

Tactics
The agency created an aggressive public relations campaign for technology analysts to communicate the success of Cerebyte's ICM in furthering the potential of the knowledge management category. After acquiring analyst endorsement, the PR agency successfully identified and pitched knowledge management and software media, obtaining several key interviews with Cerebyte's CEO by important publications read by potential customers.

Results
Cerebyte had a successful analyst and media tour, securing recognition from several research firms. In particular, IDC was an early advocate for ICM and identified Cerebyte as one of the first companies to effectively commercialize its ICM software. Several service companies partnered with Cerebyte by taking the basic software and customizing it to their own expertise. The resulting increased sales led to more media coverage in such publications as Electronic Business and The Business Journal, and to greatly expanded business opportunities for Cerebyte as its product offerings came to market.