More on Sage branding changes
I would like to start by suggesting that this is a purely speculative post and expresses only my own opinion. Please draw your own conclusions.
I’ve spoken to a lot of people since the keynote and there are some big concerns about moving the focus from the individual product brands to emphasize focus on the core Sage brand. Nothing has been firmly announced yet but the speculation is that the new branding will see product names go away to be replaced by numbers with product type designations – much like the Sage UK and European product naming.
Is this a bad thing? I realize that there are some very strong brand names in the Sage portfolio – Act!, Peachtree, MAS, Accpac, Saleslogix, etc. and there are a large number of customers using each of these products that recognize the current name.
But… are they invested emotionally with the product name? I’m not so sure. The names are used as placeholders – “my Act! system”, “enter it into Peachtree”, “get the reports from MAS” (or “Accpac”), etc. In general, we don’t see people jumping up on couches professing love for Peachtree like Tom Cruise famously did about Katie Holmes.
In fact, in many ways, shifting the focus to the Sage brand instead of individual products allows the customers, the channel and Sage to develop a clean, consistent image of the brand that allow more of a family feeling to spread for the suite of products – as opposed to loyalty to any specific products. This is a huge advantage for all involved.
Think about Apple for a moment. Apple puts out an iPad and you expect a certain amount of quality and pizzazz from the product before you even speak to a sales person or read a brochure or pick up the device. It helps me as a customer identify what I should expect and it helps Apple engineers understand that same message.
Yes – there may be some pain during the transition and, I suspect, that some folks will be still calling their software by the old, individual product name for years to come but overall I think this is a brilliant and long overdue by Sage.
Robert Wood
Wayne Schulz
Peter Wolf
I’m just out of the morning briefing. In a nutshell this is being rolled as a much better long term way for Sage to up-sell customers due to an easier time that end users should have with recognizing the Sage brand.
There’s still a lot of details unknown. Expect more closer to November.
To me, this makes a lot of sense. All strong companies have a solid brand first and then product brands under that. Look at the Apple example as a case in point.
Yes, but Apple didn’t go with numbers for their product brands. “iPod” and “iPad” are extremely strong brands in and of themselves.
Intel famously paid a lot of money to a third party for the product brand “Pentium”, which broke the numeric ascension (8086, 8088, etc.)
Salesforce.com developed Chatter internally and they decided not to brand it Salesforce Social Enterprise or Salesforce 2010. They acquired Jigsaw and seem to be holding steady on its brand name.
Couldn’t Sage build the overall brand without sacrificing the long standing product brands?
The names aren’t currently Act!, MAS 90, and Peachtree. They’re Sage Act!, Sage ERP MAS 90, and Sage Peachtree. The products are all already cobranded as Sage and the individual product name. If anything changing the official brand name a few times like MAS has gone through slows down the recognition of the Sage brand. I’m pretty sure that renaming them isn’t going to decrease any confusion in what product you need but it should increase the overall name recognition of Sage in North America.
Exactly — the name already captures the relatively unknown Sage brand (at least to our prospects) plus the well known product brand.
For the really strong product brands, there is a risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water — but it must be a risk worth taking.
@AzambaInc Keep in mind that Sage isn’t a brand yet–Microsoft and Apple are brands already as are their products. I agree with Steve – on the really strong brands, Sage is throwing the baby out with the bath water. I just can’t help look at what Microsoft did with the Dynamics brand. Several years and billions of dollars later and most CPA’s still don’t recognize Dynamics GP but know what Great Plains is.
Working exclusively with MAS 90 and 200, I’m not sure I am qualified to judge the power of the product brand. I, my staff, and our customers are obviously familiar with the product name but most prospects we talk to aren’t familiar with it at all. When describing Sage, I always fall back to “the company that published Act! and Peachtree.” Now those are brands that the public recognizes.
@Brian – we also use those very brands to establish credibility when introducing SageCRM.
So, the glass is half full perspective would be that we can continue to leverage those brands long after they are no longer official — until the time comes that “Sage” is at least as recognizable as “ACT!” and “Peachtree”.
Sage is planning to brand Sage Peachtree and Sage Simply together as Sage 50. There is already a Sage 50 in the UK which is neither of those. When you buy Sage 50 what product will you get? How does calling three distinct products the same name not cause confusion for customers and for sales? The brand recoginition may increase but it may not be in the positive way that Sage is predicting.
The continued conversation is interesting.
Do you use an Apple or an iPhone; a Blackberry or a RIM?
Do you drive a GM or a Cadillac?
Looks to me like the Branding folks are imitating a Coca Cola strategy where it makes sense to build a very strong brand name to sell what is essentially the same product. But when you have radically different products this kind of strategy makes it very hard for a buyer to figure out what “Sage” has to offer.
I was going to add what you essentially said. I think the comparisons to consumer brands are a little different because those are typically single use items whereas with the Sage brand you could have different industries, types of software. I’m just not sure how it all fits.
I have to second Wayne and Jim’s comments. Re-branding differently named products to follow a new sequentially-numbered naming convention that suggests a natural growth/upgrade path would makes sense if it was combined with that real upgrade path.
But where is that real upgrade path in Sage’s products? Where are the data conversion utilities, the gap analysis (to assure that each upgrade to the next higher product truly is an UPgrade that doesn’t provide new functionality at the expense of losing existing functionality), the integration between product lines, etc…….
A true upgrade path from Peachtree to MAS to Accpac to X3 and so on….. If that was first provided first then, sure……. changing the existing product names to simply be “Sage 50,” “Sage 100,” “Sage 200,” etc. makes sense.
But to take 20 (or more) dissimilar and non-upgradable products and changing their names to be more similar while doig nothing else in that regard…….. well, IMO I don’t see how that is going to fool anybody or provide a morer satisdfied end-user. I dare say it could result in some customers feeling misled and less satisfied when they outgrow their current product.