WHO: HPE

WHAT: Social Content Marketing

IDEA: In November of 2015 HP split into two companies, HP Inc. and HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise). Because of our strong work with HP, Edelman Digital DC won the work for introducing HPE to the world, responsible for social and digital media outreach.

There were 2 key challenges for this work. The first was interpreting the new brand in to social content. Edelman was handed an 80 page “brand book” that HPE had developed with another agency. It was filled with a lot of superlatives and a lot of paragraphs about those superlatives. We needed to make it intuitive. The second challenge was the audience. IT engineers hate marketing. They are a bottom line folks who need to be won over and engaged in a non-traditional way.

We solved for both by creating a social persona. “HUGH” (short for Hewlett Packard of course) was born and quickly beloved. We discussed what he looked like, the clothes he wore, the music he listened to, how he took his coffee. We designed how he spoke and how he would interact with our audience if he worked in their office. Then we packaged him up in an internal set of training modules and promotional materials and brought him to anyone who was creating content for HPE (in addition to our efforts the individual business units and agency partners also produced content for this global brand). We promoted and adopted the mantra “WWHD” or “What would HUGH do?” when it came to making creative decisions about creating content.

It worked. With HUGH HPE experienced a 4X jump in engagement metrics. We kept refining HUGH and the process, with HPE being a flagship legacy account for my team worth 1.6MM annually in revenue.