Branding Strategy for Unified Communications: To Brand or Not to Brand

As service providers evaluate their move away from legacy PBX/Unified Communications (UC) platforms to cloud UC, one of the decisions they encounter early on is their branding strategy. After all, they have two options:

1. Sell under their own brand (e.g., a white label UC product they can put their name on); or
2. Sell someone else’s brand, or co-brand with a known name

While there are several considerations here (especially financial returns, but also ease of implementation and other operational elements), we wanted to focus on just the brand aspect.

First, below are excerpts from some interesting articles that provide branding context.

• The Importance of Product Branding. The article makes the point that “By creating a strong, recognizable brand identity for a product, companies can increase customer recognition and loyalty. A well-branded product is more likely to be remembered by customers and chosen over competitors. This leads to improved market positioning and differentiation from competitors.” Differentiation is a key point here. The risk of reselling another brand is it’s not differentiated. It may be a good product, but others are selling the same thing, which leaves your differentiation options as price and other soft elements like reputation. White labeling might provide a bit more flexibility to differentiate and separate from the pack.
• What Is White Labeling and What Are Its Benefits?  This blog gets into what white labeling is and how it can be used to get into market quickly, reduce risk, and minimize development and maintenance. A key consideration for Service Providers (SPs) is the value of their own brand. If it’s strong in certain markets or particular vertical industries, it might not be necessary to leverage the additional overhead of selling someone else’s branded product.
• What Is Branding and Why Is It Important for Your Business? In this blog, this quote stuck out, “Let’s set something straight: Reputation builds up whether the business does something about it or not. The result can be a good or bad reputation. Understanding and using branding only means that you take the reins and try to control what that reputation looks like.” The takeaway here is, if your core brand is strong, do you need to resell another brand?

Now that we’re in a post-feature server[1] world, SPs are faced with some fundamental decisions as they move to the cloud. Our perspective on reselling another UC brand vs. white labeling comes down to a few key things:

• If you feel like your core brand is strong, there’s no reason to dilute it with another brand
• People that live and breathe the telecom sector know all the brand names and have applied a value to them. However, prospective customers don’t have the same perspective! They trust you to be the expert and guide them to the right solution, independent of a product’s brand name.
• Having your sales team be positioned as the trusted advisor with customers is critical. It could be argued that selling a white label product amplifies that trusted advisor status, as the company is standing behind the UC solution with its brand.

At Intermedia, we enable service providers to brand our best-in-class UC solution as their own. To learn more, check out www.intermedia.com/resellers/service-providers.

[1] Feature server: server residing in the SP network delivering hosted PBX and UC features to business customers

Sydney Weeter