MobileIron:
Trouble at the top

About

MobileIron (acquired by Ivanti), is a global enterprise security and mobility company based in the US. In February 2020, MobileIron came to Champion with a problem. It was struggling to stand out amongst its desired target audience of Enterprise C-Suite decision makers. Although its mobile-centric zero trust security solutions were superior to those of its competitors, such as Microsoft and IBM, it was being undermined by the lower prices these brands were offering and their seemingly safer reputations, meaning MobileIron’s sales teams were unable to get their foot in the door.

MobileIron turned to Champion to develop a campaign that would enhance demand in the company’s mobile-centric zero trust security solutions and that would create a bank of content that the sales team could use to nurture conversations.

Strategy

To help MobileIron overcome these challenges, we needed to develop a prospect-centric narrative that spoke directly to the C-Suite decision makers MobileIron was trying to target, while also being of interest to the media.

Then, in January 2020, the news broke that Jeff Bezos’ 2018 phone hack was triggered by a WhatsApp message from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. This was a classic example of a mobile phishing attack, where users are tricked into opening a malicious file. In this instance, the successful attack enabled hackers to download files resident on Bezos’ device.

While such attacks are common, we wondered if C-suite executives are more at risk to these types of cyberattacks and data breaches than the rest of their organisation, and if so, why? To investigate this hypothesis and expose the issue of weak C-Suite cybersecurity, we decided to conduct market research that simultaneously questioned both IT professionals on their bosses’ attitudes towards cybersecurity, and C-Suite business leaders on their business’s cybersecurity protocols.

From analysing the data, we uncovered two alarming truths:

• C-Suite executives are the most likely members of a business to be targeted by cybercriminals.
• C-Suite executives are the most likely members of a business to ask for their cybersecurity protocols to be relaxed for them.

Using these two data points, we were able to create our ‘Trouble at the Top’ news narrative, which highlighted the problem of pinnacle-IT, where those at the top were putting their organisation at risk by not adhering to the rules. We used this narrative as a trojan horse to carry MobileIron’s messaging around its mobile-centric zero trust security platform to its desired target audience.

In order to deliver our narrative and messaging, we created a press release that was sold into the tier-1 media outlets we know MobileIron’s desired target audience would be reading, and a report that was gated for lead capture on MobileIron’s website.