How CMS giant Stibo DX is reaching new media businesses by sharpening up its value proposition
A media enterprise platform that handles content creation, asset management and multi-channel content distribution, CUE has become a vital cog for many of the largest media businesses across the globe. For its creator, Stibo DX, it’s a remarkable success story driven by the close relationship the Danish company has struck up with its clients.
“CUE has gained its popularity primarily because it is developed in close collaboration with our customers,” says Kim Svendsen, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Stibo DX. “It may sound like something any company would say, but we are referring to a highly unique group of users and a platform that has evolved to its current state through 45 years of continuous innovations tailored to the same group of businesses: large media companies with a need for efficient content creation and publication.
“Naturally, the challenges for our customers have evolved significantly over the years. However, they continue to stay with us for a very, very long time because they trust us as a close partner who adapt to their changing needs.”
While CUE has been adapted over the decades to become an essential part of huge newsrooms, it does also work or smaller publishers and broadcasters. Key to effectively catering to these media companies is knowing how they operate and what they need from a multichannel CMS. To get answers, Stibo DX turned to FIPP Consultancy, which provides advisory, M&A and change management services across a whole spectrum of publishing and media topics.
“FIPP has a broad knowledge of the media industry across segments. Their heritage in periodicals/magazines was a strong base, but today their consultants have an incredibly detailed knowledge about all media segments ranging from national broadcasters and large conglomerates to smaller independent digital-only publishers,” says Svendsen.
“Their understanding of the similarities and differences across segments gave our team an intricate matrix of business needs, sales triggers, key stakeholders, and possible go-to-market strategies for the various types of media companies.”
Getting to work
To help Stibo DX assess how they might approach different media businesses and adapt their product packaging, FIPP Consulting lined up a series of eight workshops with different teams at the company, including the senior, product, sales and marketing teams.
The sessions identified a number of segments for Stibo DX to consider – like scale publishers (bigger magazine groups), broadcasters, conglomerates, SME publishers, news agencies and speed publishers – and explored which were suitable for the CMS used by big newsrooms and which weren’t.
“We took Stibo DX through each of those segments and we asked ourselves what are the factors that make these segments unique and therefore what is the value proposition that’s going to work if you’re going to try capture this market?” says Alastair Lewis, Principal & Managing Director of FIPP Consulting.
“We added our knowledge and expertise in helping Stibo DX understand some of the factors that would influence the decision making and the propensity to be able to buy in that space.”
Hitting the mark
The workshops gave the Stibo DX invaluable insight into the media landscape which allowed them to draw up new sales strategies in double-quick time.
“FIPP helped us sharpen our value proposition across 10 different categories, and this work could be put to use immediately,” says Svendsen. “As a company developing a certain large platform it can be difficult to see the business value it provides from the perspective of a national broadcaster, but at the same time as a group of local newspapers.
“The platform does cater to all these segments, but they use it differently and FIPP did a great job at helping us sharpen our perception of the challenges, motivations and new opportunities at play across the entire industry.”
For Stibo DX it was of crucial importance that the market mapping carried out by FIPP Consulting remained unbiased and would not be swayed by the company’s own hypotheses.
“For this reason, the first workshops were structured so FIPP set the scene for each segment, not us,” Svendsen adds. “This worked well and proved FIPP’s detailed understanding of what is at play for various types of news publishers and other and media businesses.
“Of course, we validated their advice against other industry experts, trade associations and of course our own customers in each segment, and the FIPP recommendations have been proved valuable and actionable.”
Overall, Svendsen describes working with FIPP Consultancy as “horizon-broadening”.
“We come from the technology side of the industry, and while FIPP understands the importance of technology, they also did a good job of broadening our view of how this technology fits into the diverse business goals of different media enterprises,” he points out.
“It is no simple task to elaborate on subjects such as ideal solutions, procurement processes, management motivation, and growth paths for ten different categories of media. FIPP handled this expertly.”
