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Nortel vs. Cisco
By Mark Evans | June 12, 2007
BrandWeek has an interesting article - Why Nortel Feels Strong Enough To Take on Cisco - that talks about Nortel’s efforts to rebuild its brand under the leadership of chief marketing officer Lauren Flaherty, who joined the company about a year ago after a long stint with IBM. Flaherty told BrandWeek that Nortel wants to “rebuild the reputation of the company by giving [it] a voice in the marketplace . . . We don’t want to be defined by our financial history or perceptions about our leadership.”
It’s an approach with all the right intentions but I think it’s going to take a long of work and a considerable amount of time before Nortel can really put its troubles (accounting scandal, three CEOs in the past three years, etc.) behind it. It won’t be as simple as coming up with a new, snappy marketing slogan, for example.
If you look at Nortel over the the past decade, the company had a reputation as a solid, innovative telecom supplier in the mid-1990s. By the late-1990s under the leadership of CEO John Roth, it had become an aggressive player with multi-billion dollar acquisitions and ambitious goals to take sales to $40-million. Today, under CEO Mike Zafirovski, Nortel’s in rebuilding mode from its strategic focus, operational structure and corporate image.
Truth be told, if you asked people about Nortel today, they’d probably mention the accounting scandal before things such as innovation or leading-edge technology. This isn’t to suggest that Nortel can’t recapture some of its luster but it will be a challenging assignment.
Topics: Executive Suite |