2001. A year to remember? Not for tech stock investors. The Nasdaq index plummeted 21 percent to close the year at 1,950.
 
Good performers were the exception, not the rule. That’s why investors in Concord Communications (Nasdaq: CCRD) are smiling. Bucking the downward trend of other tech stocks, Concord’s stock jumped 241 percent from 8.87 on Jan. 2, 2001 to 21.44 one year later.
 
How does a technology company generate enough investor confidence during an economic slump to push its stock price up? First, Concord expanded its eHealth™ Suite to meet a pent-up demand for integrated software that lets companies effectively manage their entire infrastructures. This major expansion of eHealth enabled the company to sell more effectively, increasing revenues.
 
Concord also bucked the trend of massive layoffs. CEO Jack Blaeser drew a line in the sand and said that laying off half his staff, the company’s most valuable asset, would not be a viable long-term plan for the company or its investors. So the company didn’t do it.
 
Concord also convinced investors, enterprises, service providers and corporate America that the billions of dollars spent on the latest applications, lightning-fast networks and top-of-the-line routers didn’t amount to much if the infrastructure fails or operates at a snail’s pace. Businesses can’t afford to have customers wait to access their accounts online. They can’t have international corporations enduring a sluggish virtual private network (VPN) because some hidden server is down. Concord’s eHealth hunts down performance issues and immediately notifies system administrators so they address problems before customers notice.
 
Getting Concord’s new message across required a PR strategy, and a public relations firm – Beaupre & Co. – that re-focused corporate positioning. The challenge was to convince the media, which had pigeonholed Concord’s technology into just network management, that eHealth could also manage systems and applications, the other key elements in a business infrastructure. Beaupre & Co. worked with Concord to develop a positioning strategy around the idea that businesses only need one product, eHealth, instead of four different products, to keep their infrastructures running optimally.
 
Through consistent and creative messaging, Beaupre & Co. helped convince analysts, the media and Wall Street that Concord and eHealth have set the standard for reliable infrastructure management. Beaupre & Co. was able to parlay that attention into compelling features in Investors Business Daily, eWeek, Network World, InfoWorld, The Net Economy and many other media outlets. The company’s stock performance validates how investors responded to the new messaging.
 
“Our PR challenge was significant. We had to change the way the press was thinking about us, and the press isn’t easily convinced. Beaupre came in as a partner, guided us in developing a new stable of clear messages that focused on the entire infrastructure, and helped us create a plan for delivering these messages consistently to key media sources. Now the media, and the market, see us as an end-to-end infrastructure management provider,” said Ellen Kokos, Concord’s executive vice president of marketing.
 

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