Symantec Promotional Plan (Third Major Blog)

Promotional Plan
Memo
To: Symantec Healthcare Industry Solutions Manager: John Lazarus
From: William Chen
Date: 5/8/2009
Re: Strategy in Promoting Symantec Vontu after the Acquisition
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Symantec has been established for almost 30 years, and it has gained its reputation in many different software industries. It went IPO in 1989, and it now has a market capacity of 12.22 billion and 17 thousands employees working globally in 40 countries. The company is very subtle, so a lot of people may not even be aware of its existence. However, almost everyone that has some kinds of basic computer experiences would know or heard of Norton Antivirus. Unsurprisingly, the developer of this famous antivirus program is Symantec.

Norton Antivirus is popular and widely accepted by many computer consumers; yet, that is only part of what Symantec actually does. Symantec focuses on helping customers protect their infrastructure, information and interactions by delivering software and services providing IT security, data privacy and compliance. Currently, the company is servicing more than 99% of the Fortune 1000 companies and possessing more than 400 patents worldwide.

A year and half ago, Symantec acquired the biggest healthcare data-loss-prevention (DLP) giant Vontu. The company is aiming to take a big share of the healthcare data industry; thus, it went under negotiation and finally bought out Vontu for 350 million dollars. Because Symantec is new into the field, it comes to a bottleneck of how the company is going to promote itself to medium to large hospitals and clinics with 200 beds or more in the US market.

In this advisory memo, I will focus on analyzing the market and the company ,and come up with a step-by-step promotional strategies that will help Symantec to sell itself by offering the most comprehensive protocol coverage with Vontu DLP program.
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Company Goals:

Symantec’s Mission:
Symantec seeks to become the leader in security, data privacy, and compliance in Healthcare. Vontu DLP supports this mission by offering the most comprehensive protocol coverage on the market, including the monitoring and securing the web traffic. It also allows organizations to protect intellectual property, demonstrate compliance, and guard their brand.

Expected Penetration:
Symantec is expecting to have a $30M annual booking for this product from Healthcare, as well as to increase market awareness by 40%. Assuming the price of this product is 150K, the company expects to sell 200 units of this product.

Marketing Budget:
Market budget will be determined by sales. I would recommend re-investing 10% of gross profit towards the marketing budget thereby allowing the marketing budget to be directly pegged to the success of Vontu.

Industry Overview:

The Need of the Industry:
Companies, especially hospitals, need to stop the confidential data from being sent outside their organization to ensure compliance with data security and privacy policies. Vontu Data Loss Prevention will give companies the ability to ensure that confidential data regarding their customers and employees is protected.

Market Potential:
In the U.S., there are 6013 hospitals, and 1629 hospitals with 200+ beds. Across endpoint, network, and storage system comprises of approximately 60% of the market share. The data loss prevention market is worth around $250 million in 2008.

Competition:
Many other firms exist in the DLP market, ranging from small firms like GLB and Code Green to big companies such as McAfee, Trend Micro, Websense, and Tiblus, a company which RSA, a sub-division of EMC, has bought. The problem with these companies is that none of them is comprehensive. Most of the products from these companies can only provide one or two needs. The solution to this problem is to create a product that would cover all customers’ needs. Vontu, now part of Symantec, has already occupied 60% of the market share and introduced its Vontu DLP 8.0 program that fulfills different areas of needs.

Future:
As cost of data breach continues to rise, more companies are going to be aware of the importance of DLP. Once Symantec Vontu DLP 8.0 program has completely entered the market, it will continue to improve and ensure that the program, with its 3 dynamic sections
--network, storage, and endpoint-- strives to satisfy customer needs. Most importantly, Symantec Vontu will keep up with its customer service with all hospitals, as well as many of the Fortune companies. Lastly, it will continue to maintain its status as market leader.


Possible Promotional Strategies:

In order to achieve the expected penetration, Symantec will employ the following strategies:

Corporate Image: Symantec will connect its corporate image with Vontu. Symantec Vontu will be viewed as the leader in security for hospital data privacy, security, and compliance. Symantec Vontu will (1) assist organizations in the protection of their confidential and proprietary data, (2) focus on healthcare providers (i.e. medium to large hospitals), and (3) provide complete data loss prevention solutions as a trusted and experience company. Symantec Vontu has excellent corporate image, leveraging it will be essential in achieving the goal of increased awareness.

Position: Market Targets (lock): Large and mid-size hospitals (200 – 500+ beds) will be primarily targeted, due to the wealth of information they have that is susceptible to breaches. Product Image (key): Symantec Vontu will be positioned as a complete solution to data loss.

Symantec’s competitors are beginning to produce more “complete” data loss prevention solutions, which in turn may potentially hurt Vontu’s uniqueness. Therefore, to combat this, Symantec should focus its positioning on “quality”, “experience”, and “trust”.
Vontu should also aim to differentiate itself via the peripheral components of their product; for example, customer service.

Product: Comprehensive Symantec Vontu DLP program is needed and will be provided here.

Price: To protect Symantec’s “leader” positioning, it should utilize the “leader” pricing strategy. It should also utilize “volume pricing” and “bundle pricing”. These strategies will benefit Symantec. The price of Symantec Vontu is dependent on the amount of beds in the hospital and the number of hours resellers need to work with hospitals on implementation and maintenance. The price of Symantec Vontu’s DLP program should be charged at between $25,000 and $500,000 with the service cost being $120 per hour and 50 to 200 hours are needed.

Distribution: A direct sales force will be the primary distribution technique. A limited amount of the product will be available to resellers, who will need to be highly trained. Due to the complexity of setting up a complete system such as Symantec’s data loss prevention, Symantec should utilize a direct-to-end-buyer marketing strategy. In other words, Symantec needs to directly sell its products to the buyers in USA.

Promotion: Events such as trade shows (for example, ANI:Healthcare Finance Conference), seminars, and webinars will provide a focused and detailed promotion. A newsletter mailed to those ,who have expressed interest, will help to maintain interest and awareness. A website is available online, with detailed information available on the compliance, analyst research, and others, which requires a user to provide his or her name and email address in order to access these documents. Users’ info will allow Symantec to keep in contact with those who would be interested in this information. Ads will be run in Healthcare Financial Management and Hospitals & Health Networks, two healthcare-management magazines.

Market Information System (MIS): Constant monitoring of market needs is a requirement for success. In order to collect information from the marketplace, Symantec is going to focus on booked revenues, opportunities, qualified leads, leads, customer satisfaction (or NPS), average deal size, and sales cycle.

Conclusion (Recommendation):

To be successful in marketing the company, Symantec requires identifying its goal, understanding the industry situation, and providing comprehensive promotional strategies. Most importantly, Symantec needs all the steps and possible strategies listed above in the promotional strategy section. Marketing is incomplete when one of the building blocks of strategies (corporate image, positioning, etc.) is missing. Marketing, especially promotion, requires companies to have a full picture. There are may be other possible routes to success in promoting Symantec, but if all the strategies above are followed, the company should be able to give itself a unique opportunity to satisfy its goals/missions.