Cisco Targets Retailers

January 2007

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Networking giant Cisco over the next year plans to deliver a full marketing, sales and training campaign aimed at big-box, regional and small retailers, Cisco chief executive John Chambers told Dealerscope during an exclusive meeting with select members of the industry’s leading publications. “We help lead our partners to develop profitable go-to-market strategies based on how consumers purchase products,” Chambers said on the eve of his keynote speech at CES in Las Vegas, referring to the marketing, training and sales support Cisco executives say they will roll out to retail partners of all sizes in support of its new focus on a variety of consumer technologies.

“It’s Cisco’s philosophy. We’ve won top partner awards more consistently than all companies combined. We will continue to lead our partners in profitability and go-to-market strategies based on how consumers buy product. We’ve been able to strike a balance to make all our partners profitable.”

Later, Chambers used his CES keynote to officially introduce Cisco’s new marketing campaign, which is designed to expand the company’s brand recognition from a premier commercial networking manufacturer to a well-known leader of consumer technologies. The campaign is designed to position Cisco as the purveyor of “The Human Network” and will align the parent company more closely with its Linksys, Kiss and Scientific Atlanta lines of consumer networking, communications, entertainment and set-top box products.



The move signals Cisco’s recognition of the strength savvy retailers bring to helping consumers understand, and ultimately buy, new home technologies. The company traditionally targets large big-box chains for its marketing and sales programs but beginning in the second half of this year will shoot for regional and smaller retailers.

“Linksys makes significant investments in training, but we’ve been focused mainly on the mass-market stores,” said Charlie Giancarlo, president of Linksys and senior vice president and chief development officer for Cisco. “But as we come out with more connected home products we’ll be targeting more specialty stores.” The company realizes that in the past it rushed some products to market that suffered performance issues and were difficult for consumers to set up and use. Under its new strategy, Cisco says it will take greater efforts to ensure all products achieve the highest levels of interoperability, ease of use and performance, said company executives who joined Chambers at the meeting.

“You could consider some of our past products as version 1.0, maybe 2.0,” Giancarlo said “A year ago we decided that, before we put out out next level of products they have to reach a much higher level of performance.” New Linksys products include the NAS 200 Network Storage System for the secure storage and sharing of digital files, Wireless-N Gigabit Router, Wireless N Gaming Router, Wireless G Print Server, the Powerline AV Adapter and the iPhone family of Internet-connected phones. --Jeff O’Heir

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