Pure Storage lifts lid on multimillion-dollar advertising campaign

Low brand recognition the biggest barrier to sales, exec admits

Pure Storage has launched a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign in a bid to boost its brand recognition and drive sales.

Speaking at Pure's Accelerate conference in San Francisco, the firm's vice president of partner marketing Aimee Catalano said that the branding boost was based on partner feedback.

"About six months ago we did a partner survey and asked about barriers to sales... and brand messaging was at the top of the list," she said. "That helped us to justify a multimillion-dollar campaign to go tell the world who Pure is. So when you go out there and talk to customers, they recognise the orange [Pure's brand colour].

"As I am sure many of you saw, we have a bunch of brand advertising - we are in airports, we are in the New York Times, we are plastering ourselves [everywhere]."

As part of the branding campaign, Pure Storage is offering partners a range of marketing resources including adverts, a sales 'playbook', seminar-in-a-box materials, email content and phone call scripts.

Catalano insisted that when her team thinks up marketing efforts, partners' needs are considered first, unlike with other companies, which do their own thing and "channelise" the materials after. "Channelise is a dirty word," she said.

During her presentation to partners, Catalano unveiled plans to launch a channel-focused sales mobile app, which she said was custom built to help partners register deals on the go.

"After many, many months of the team working extremely hard on it, we're introducing a mobile app - Pure On The Go," she said.

"It is the easiest app you will have ever seen. You can do mobile deal registration, you can receive, share and reject leads and get content at your fingertips. We know our sellers are mobile and it is a proven fact that if you provide a mobile experience to sellers, they are more effective and sell more."

Future iterations of the application will allow channel sales staff to configure deals and quote prices to customers, which Catalno said would be "super, super cool".