Many technology companies, and especially high-tech startups, think of branding as a marketing gimmick – long on puffery, short on substance. A clever logo, a witty tagline, and perhaps an expensive ad campaign are the branding images that typically come to mind.

But to Michael Concordia, Vice President of Marketing for CombineNet, whose sophisticated decision guidance systems save its giant industrial customers huge sums of money, branding isn’t about logos or taglines – it’s really all about delivering a product that solves specific problems. 

And Concordia is someone who actually knows a thing or two about branding. He learned about it while working for the organization that practically invented the concept. Before his move to the technology field, he spent 11 years with consumer giant Proctor & Gamble. Then to Godiva Chocolates, a division of Campbell Foods, and later to The Becker Group, a company that supplies Christmas displays for casinos, hotels and other commercial properties. In each case, selling the sizzle was at least as important as selling the steak. 

So what is branding, anyway? Strategically, Concordia defines branding as all the activities marketing goes through to create brand equity – the sum of all the assets linked to a brand’s name that contribute to the value of its product or service. Concordia quotes a CEO at P&G who once defined brand equity as “the market value of the company’s stock, less the assets on the balance sheet.” His point: get people to focus on the value that can be created by building strong brands –intangible values that lead to highly tangible results. Among the key components of brand equity: brand awareness, brand loyalty, and perceived quality. A strong brand gives a company pricing power as well as market leverage. 

Bottom-line Branding Benefits 

Strategic branding can actually enhance the value of a product, even when competing technologies outperform it. Strategic brand positioning differentiates that product, establishing recall and recognition in its product category. It can help deliver a consistent and clear message to prospects that, in turn, avoids market confusion and shorten the sales cycle. 

Over time strong brands effectively create demand, attracting both customers and premium channel partners. Strong brands earn the trust of their customers, building long-term loyalty and the opportunity to charge higher prices than lesser known competitors. Not only that, while the life cycles of technology products are limited, strong brands have staying power. That quality makes branding an important part of product life cycle planning because it brings value to collateral services as well as to product line extensions and next generation replacements.

For investors, the bottom line is that effective branding can enhance the company’s value. Take FORE Systems and its “Networks of Steel” positioning – perhaps one of the most well-known ad campaigns in the Pittsburgh technology market. Designed to differentiate FORE Systems’ products based upon intangible benefits, the company’s branding brought value to the products themselves, not just to their functionalities. “Networks of Steel’ was more than an advertising slogan – it was a brand promise built on images of strength and history that FORE delivered through products and services. Between 1997 and 1999, FORE Systems revenues grew nearly 60 percent – from $402 million to $632 million. In April of 1999, the company was acquired in a cash transaction valued at more than $4 billion. 

Why did FORE Systems represent such an attractive acquisition and premium price? “Strong Technology,” according to Marconi. FORE’s “Networks of Steel” positioning had paid off handsomely. 

The Taxonomy of Branding 

For most people, according to former FORE Systems/Marconi Communications strategist Saman Haqqi, whose duties there had included strategic planning related to the launch of new product lines and services, the toughest branding challenge is not so much formulating a good brand strategy, it’s actually executing that strategy in everything the company does. “That requires focus, discipline, consistency and clarity,” she said. 

Ms. Haqqi, who is now Director of Marketing for Vivisimo, described how she is applying that same discipline to her current employer, a developer of advanced enterprise search software. “Our branding is evolving around the concept of ‘speed of implementation,’ ” she said. That positioning determines the architecture and design of all upcoming products which need to build on, incorporate, and deliver this differentiation.” In essence, product managers are responsible for creating the brand experience in the mind of the customer – generating product differentiation, top-of-mind product and market recall, as well as a distinctive competitive advantage. 

As a result, brand positioning at Vivisimo is inherent in product development as well as the marketing processes. “Our product development has always been guided by a focus on building simple solutions to complex problems,” she said. “We recognized and communicated our branding formally.” As a result, the ‘speed of implementation’ brand positioning at Vivisimo is simply an extension of its core development philosophy. 

The company’s flagship product, the Vivisimo Clustering Engine, replaces taxonomy and categorization products from other vendors. Just like taxonomy software, the Clustering Engine allows companies to present users with documents or search results organized into different categories instead of the long, undifferentiated lists typical of search solutions such as Google and Yahoo. However, the product does so without pre-processing the documents or search results, in contrast to the extensive development, training and document processing required with taxonomy-building solutions. That means Vivisimo’s software can be up and running in just hours, instead of months, and it requires no maintenance or training, resulting in unprecedented implementation speeds.

This same ‘speed of implementation’ brand positioning recently guided the development of Vivisimo’s search engine – which has also been designed from the ground up to allow companies to crawl, index, and search their content without pre-processing. The ‘speed of implementation’ positioning drove the company’s development process – as well as its name for the new product: Velocity.

Getting Buy-In

So what keeps more tech companies from capitalizing on the benefits of strategic branding? According to Michael Concordia, the highest barriers are not in the marketplace; they’re in the minds of senior managers. He has found the key to gaining top management buy-in of branding as a strategic driver begins by understanding the background of those individuals because that background defines their bias and their view of the world. 

As a brand champion for his current employer, CombineNet, Concordia has been fortunate: his CEO, Tony Bonidy, had previously spent 17 years with IBM. As a result, Bonidy arrived at CombineNet with an understanding of how a strong brand can produce instant credibility in its product category. This credibility not only shortens sales cycles, it also becomes the rationale for channel partners to make the product a priority part of their offering. 

But even if the CEO thinks of branding strategically, that thought process has to filter down through the organization before it can generate consistent results. Most tech companies, for example, have technology gurus, sales leaders, and others on the senior team who must also buy in – and they may not intuitively recognize ‘the brand’ as a strategic asset. That’s when you’ve got to see the world through that team member’s eyes and know his ‘pain points,’ according to Concordia. For example, does delivering a better technology touch a nerve? Does increasing sales? 
So, for instance, if a top manager is enamored with technology, you need to make the business case in terms he understands – that is, in terms of user requirements. Define those user requirements to meet the value proposition you’ve developed through your customer research and competitive analysis. In the end, you’ll be delivering a technological solution that offers value to the customer by solving his business problem. That’s brand positioning.

But not everyone gets it, at least not from the outset. At one time, Concordia recalled, he found himself face-to-face with CombineNet’s Vice President of Engineering, who felt that the product’s positioning and marketing message should talk more about the technology and less about the customer. For Concordia, that was precisely the wrong message. So how did he convince the engineering VP to adopt a position that emphasizes customer value? 

Appealing to the man’s analytical nature, Concordia reviewed data showing who actually bought and used the software. It revealed that CombineNet’s product was not being purchased by technology-oriented decision makers. Instead, it was being purchased by executives who were buying it to solve business problems. “When you turn on the shower you want strong water pressure,” Concordia reflected. “Value-driven decision makers really don’t care whether you use a quarter-inch or three-quarters inch pipe, as long as it flows sufficiently.” 

Flushed with success, Concordia is now in process of developing a new iteration of CombineNet’s brand. The public unveiling of his strategic branding position will have to wait a few more months. But he’s taking a research-based approach to the branding process so he can truly understand CombineNet’s customers’ pain points and his competitors’ positions, as well as his own company’s unique product advantages. 

What’s the point? Seeing the world through the eyes of another offers technology producers a unique opportunity to feel their customers’ pain and identify the perfect solution. That not only applies to outside customers, it also applies to one’s own colleagues. Looking at product opportunities that way is to see the real foundation for effective brand positioning.