Champions of Product Management Under the microscope, Cellomics looks huge | Under the microscope, Cellomics looks huge |
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Looking big is looking good for local biotechnology tool maker Size matters, particularly when it comes to selling pricey technologies that require long-term support from their makers. For Cellomics’ customers and prospects, perceptions of the company’s size, or the comparative lack thereof, was a challenge the bio-screening tool maker needed to overcome in order to compete against emerging giants. Cellomics Marketing Director Judy Masucci explains how the company made itself larger than life in the eyes of its customers, its prospects, and maybe even its competitors. Until about two years ago, the small world of high-content automated cell screening system providers was inhabited by a handful of startup companies, including Pittsburgh-based Cellomics, a pioneer in the arcane market that serves pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology firms, and academic cell biologists with automated cellular imaging platforms and bioanalytic software. That was about the time when things began to change, according to Judy Masucci, Cellomics’ Director of Marketing and herself a credentialed scientist with post-doctoral research experience. During just the past year, half of the market’s original startups have been acquired by huge corporations, including General Electric. “It’s gone from a market of little startups, to one of big Goliaths and a few little startups,” she said. “Cellomics is still in that little startup category; the big ones are multi-billion dollar companies now. “When I joined Cellomics in August of last year, the biggest concern our sales reps got from customers was about stability” she recalled. It got even worse this year when GE bought Cellomic’s main competitor: “Is Cellomics going to be here to support me with the likes of GE and Molecular Devices and Beckman Coulter and other giants now in the market?”
Constantly having to deal with questions about its very survival detracted from the company’s essential product message. But with systems that start around $200,000 and climb up sharply from there, the question of Cellomics’ long-term stability in a rising tide of giant competitors was a critical one for prospective customers; nobody wants to spend a fortune on a system that no one will be around to service and support down the road. Getting past those nagging doubts about its survival to the point where Cellomics could confidently assert its market leadership and compete on its technical merits would be crucial to the company’s success. Looking small As with most startups, concerns about the company’s long-term viability pre-dated the technology bubble burst of 2000-2001. But when it hit, and the company was forced to slash its workforce from 200 down to under 70, those worries were exacerbated. It didn’t help that the company seemed almost indifferent to established marketing tools. Its Web site was badly out of date. Its calls from journalists went unreturned. And its marketing collateral was amateurish. Despite its impressive technical accomplishments and an enviable customer base, the company suffered a real perception problem: it was almost invisible outside a very small circle of scientists and specialists. Enter Judy Masucci, whose background included technical as well as product management and sales management positions for a Boston life sciences company acquired by PerkinElmer and later, after marrying her Pittsburgh-based fiancée, a product management post with Fisher Scientific.
"When I came to Cellomics I put in place a corporate branding program to get the word out that we’re stable, that we’ve always been here, we always will be, that we’re not going anywhere, and we can solve your cellular imaging-to-analysis problems,” she said. “We did three major things. We put together a print ad campaign. We put together a Web-based advertising campaign – both e-mails and Web-based ads on sites that scientists commonly go to for information. And we also started interviewing with journalists. There are a lot of independent journalists and over the past year, high-content screening has been one of the hot topics all these journalists are writing about. Raising visibility “We’ve made ourselves more visible through press releases and enhanced visibility on our Website. My name is out there. If you search Google for ‘Judy P. Masucci,’ you’ll come up with Cellomics. So now we’ve got a contact name out there for journalists to call. And when we get a call from journalists, I assemble my team of product managers to answer their questions,” she said. Now instead of getting one person to call them back who maybe couldn’t answer their questions, the word has gotten around that if you call Cellomics, you’re going to get an hour of five people’s time and they’re going to give you more information than any other company gives you. I’ve developed relationships with a lot of these journalists so they call me now. With us, they get a call back the same day; I’ll pull my team together and get the right people to talk to within their deadline.” The results have led to a far higher profile for the company. Over the past year, working with a talented local designer, all of Cellomics’ collateral material has been revised and enhanced. Sharply targeted trade journal advertising has also helped raise the company’s public profile. “The message we went for with our ad was corporate stability. We took an image of cells and overlaid it with industry buzzwords,” she said. “There’s a big bubble over the cells that says, ‘Listen to what your cells are telling you.’ At the bottom the tagline is ‘We’re listening.’ [Go to http://listen.cellomics.com for the online version] That was meant to convey corporate strength. Two very simple lines about being your solution for cell-based drug discovery and systems biology. Other communication tactics included e-mail to the company’s own list of 5,000 customers and prospective customers, augmented by a purchased e-mail list. Online advertising, including select banner advertising, has also been very effective, she pointed out. Opt-in industry newsletters targeting different prospect groups have been good vehicles for new technology announcements and trade show promotions. And Cellomics’ presence at key trade shows feature the company’s new, larger-than-life exhibit booth. Bulking up “We’ve got the presence of a company much larger than we are,” Masucci said. “Most of our smaller competitors will have a ten-foot booth at a trade show. When we go to our biggest show, the Society for BioMolecular Screening, we’ve got a 20x30-foot booth. We’ve invested money into the key trade shows. We’re not at every trade show, which some of our bigger competitors are. But at the key ones, we have a big presence, so we look bigger than we are.” Leaving the impression of size is not solely a matter of better communications and larger display booths. There is also the matter of high-profile strategic partners, and Cellomics has aligned itself with some of the biggest. “Through our investors and our board of directors, we have affiliated with a very large microscopy company, Carl Zeiss,” she said. “The president of Carl Zeiss MicroImaging, their North American imaging division, is also chairman of our board. Zeiss has been with us since the very early days, as an investor. They’ve been one of our strongest investors. In North America they are also our distributor. Working with us, they co-develop and manufacture our instruments. So we have partnered with them, and over the last 6-8 months, they’ve started aggressively advertising on behalf of Cellomics. What we’ve been able to do with the Zeiss partnership, and through all the marketing we’ve done, is to make us look bigger than we are in competing against these behemoth companies.” Recent alliances and partnerships with IBM and GE have further cemented the company’s image as a major player in a field increasingly dominated by wealthy giants. And it’s working. “Less than a year ago, we were still hearing the complaint that Cellomics was not stable, that you don’t want to buy from them. We seldom hear that now. What we hear now is more about technical specs and product-based competitive threats; they’re not attacking us as not being around anymore,” she said.
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