Driving alignment for product repositioning

Through its visual methodology XPLANE helped Tektronix achieve an umbrella positioning for the company and for each of its strategic market segments.

Challenge | Tektronix had recently acquired a significant communication business, forcing the company to be reorganized around two platforms — the instruments business and the communication business. During this process Tektronix did not want to devolve the Tektronix brand, story and overall position. It realized a need to simplify the overarching positioning and articulate its position within its market segments. To start, Tektronix decided to create segment-specific marketing campaigns, and brought in XPLANE to turn one of those campaigns into a visual market segment map. That project’s success brought a fast realization of a larger need to turn all of the segment campaign positioning into compelling visuals. However, before this could be achieved, internal agreement around corporate positioning had to be reached.

Action | XPLANE facilitated a series of strategic consulting sessions with Tektronix to better understand the key elements of the industry-specific messages Tektronix wanted to tell. Each session built on the progress achieved in the previous consultation, and helped to create momentum around redefining the corporate positioning at a strategic level and aligning key internal parties on the new visual approach.

Once the new corporate-wide positioning was agreed upon, XPLANE focused on getting each of Tektronix’ segments distilled down to a single concept in order to clearly communicate the value propositions in a visual map. XPLANE and Tektronix developed six visual maps for each of the key market segments as a way to accelerate, clarify, distill and simplify the messaging and take a more relevant position in the industry.

Results | What started as a request for one XPLANE deliverable turned into an ongoing consultative relationship between the two companies. Tektronix elevated its corporate story to a more compelling and relevant narrative, ensuring better dialogue with customers and more interest and understanding with the media and industry analyst audiences.

“Going into the engagement with XPLANE we were experimenting with the notion of visualization. However through the XPLANE facilitated visualization sessions we were able to turn complexity into both visual tools and a far more relevant and compelling narrative at both the company and segment level.”

— Martyn Etherington, Vice President of Marketing, Tektronix