Do you recommend to have separate names for your product and your company?
Bob
12 replies
Is your answer different if you have a single product vs multiple products?
Replies
Ali Rajool@rajool
It depends on the answer to the following question:
If your current product fails, do you want to launch another one with your current team or not?
In case your answer is yes, choose separate names for them, but if the answer is No, there is no need for that, as you have to run different social media accounts for each of them. Branding Matters.
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If you have a single product then you can use the same name. In the multiple products case, it would be better if you had an inheritable name for your other products in the lineup.
@saurabhyadav I agree with Saurabh. I think it's not a question that can be answered in a vacuum but depends on your long term goals. If you envision your product being the first of a line of products, then you probably want them all to relate to your company name, perhaps, but be different from each other and from the company name. I used to work at Blackboard, and I think they did it well: Blackboard Learn, Collaborate, Connect, and so forth.
It's different if your first product will be the capstone or maybe a wrapper or platform for all the others. In this case, sharing a name with the product may make sense.
In my startup, initially, we had a different name for the company and we were building multiple products with different names.
In doing that we faced the following problems:
1. We had no time to invest in branding or promoting company name.
2. Each different products required different branding and maintaining their brand assets were difficult and time-consuming.
3. Maintaining multiple websites for painful (not to mention email ids, social media accounts and so forth).
However, there were benefits too:
1. We could experiment with different branding, styles and product lines.
2. When the product didn't work, we could kill it and start new any time
3. The main company brand wasn't really impacted by the ups and downs of the product
Soon after many years of hit and trial, one of our product picked up in the market and soon we registered a new company name similar to the product name, making it one. There were also other internal reasons why we merged them. This had many benefits:
1. Single brand to focus all our marketing and product activities
2. Managing social and other papers work was easier
But again, there were disadvantages too:
1. As the product and company name were same, if we wanted to launch anything else with different name there was difficulty and confusion internally on how to do that.
2. When the market moves and your product category changes, it becomes difficult to reinvent especially in the tech industry.
Personally, I have noticed any popular and successful products are owned by a company with a different name. It depends on your product roadmaps and business strategy plan.
Unlike top companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, it is really difficult to invest in all your brands equally and you have to compromise. In B2B enterprises the general trend is to promote only your company names and have a variation of your product names tagged with a company name like Salesforce, IBM, Oracle etc.
Hope that was helpful.
@deep_sherchan We had similar experiences. We eventually decided to use our ventures into different verticals as a signal to launch as a separate brand or not. Thanks for sharing your experience.
We launched our flagship product under a separate brand. My company is called Crucial Human (https://crucialhuman.com) but the product we launched initally was called Paper Workspace. We have since rebranded that as Crucial Human Workspace because as a startup, we found that it was a bad idea to confuse our audience with different brands. For example, we started getting more social media followers under Paper Workspace than on the actual company name. We also have since decided to unbundle our Workspace product and release the productivity modules inside as separate products under the Crucial Human brand.
We have another product under a completely separate vertical (edtech) and it made sense for us to launch that under a separate brand (https://flipped.app).
It all depends on your plans. We planned to launch multiple products, but in the end, we decided to let the verticals determine our branding splits - Productivity, EdTech, etc.
Hi @eddieaich, yes it can be so painful if your startup plans to move into different direction and you are stuck with your single brand names Or want to consolidate everything into one. One can never predict how your startup will evolve, I guess we just have to go through the experience of rebranding. Even many bigger companies struggle with it. Thanks for sharing your story too.
I think so. There are numerous examples of those that have used the same name for both and then had to go through the process of separating them. Google is one good example. Seems easier to avoid such a task ahead of time. What are the chances you'll always only offer the single product?
@benbrausen I suppose multiple products is the goal if we are successful. The worry about having two names now, is that it doubles the effort to think through appropriate names, otherwise we would have the same issue of renaming in the future as well.