Ask HN: Is having two brand names a dumb idea? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is having two brand names a dumb idea?

4 pointsdanoprey8 comments

I'm guilty, I've fallen in love with two names and can obtain both domains. They have a very different feel to each other, and halfway in between is the feel I want to achieve.

I am the cofounder of a cloud computing start up and we are developing an application to assist in managing cloud deployments.

The two domains are in the format: XXXXXXXcloud.com YYYYYapp.com

I'm not dumb enough to use both just because I love both, but the first one sounds perfect for a company name and the second for the app name.

Is it foolish to use both as we only have one product? Should the company name and the app name be the same?

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  Company:  Microsoft

  Brands:

         Office
         Windows
         Sharepoint
         Dynamics
         etc.

  Company: IBM

    Brands:

        Lotus
        Rational
        Tivoli
        Cognos
        WebSphere
        DB2

The point being, that it's pretty routine to have a "company name" and then one or more "brand names" that hang off of the company name. All of that said, it's a judgment call on when/what/how many brands to have... The one thing of interest that I'll throw out is this... marketing guru Jack Trout (of Positioning fame) is a big fan of launching new products under a new brand name, instead of doing a "line extension." Now that's in the context of an established company, not a startup... but I think you can generalize the point to "yes, it's OK - perhaps even preferred - to have multiple brands."

In my own case, my company name is "Fogbeam Labs" and I fully intend to name the product(s) something very specific when we have something to ship. http://www.fogbeam.com will always just be a link to the main company website... any hosted / SaaS apps will have their own domain. I should probably point out, though, that our primary focus is on the B2B / Enterprise Software market, and my biases are towards thinking in those terms. Any or all of this may have absolutely zero relevance to your situation. :-)

We are primarily B2B/Enterprise too, so that is very relevant. So your plan is to have lots of products, uniquely named, all under the Fogbeam Labs umbrella?

How would your strategy change if you only planned to have one product in the next few years?

A couple of companies from our industry are good examples here:

http://newrelic.com/ - Company name and single product name are both the same.

http://www.3tera.com/AppLogic/ - Company name and product name different (ignore their acquisition by CA for this example).

To me, 3tera's AppLogic sounds more suitable for B2B than New Relic. It also leaves us open to producing other products in the future, should we wish to.

We are primarily B2B/Enterprise too, so that is very relevant. So your plan is to have lots of products, uniquely named, all under the Fogbeam Labs umbrella?

I'm not sure that the initial plan is to have lots of products, but the current plan is for a suite of products that work in concert with each other, but also deliver some value independently. There would be a specific brand to cover those products, for sure. Any future products might come out under a different brand name, but that's looking ahead an awful lot for us right now.

I will say that, in general, I think IBM have struck a good balance, for a company that has a broad product line... they have lots of products, but the fall nicely into the various divisions: Lotus, DB2, Tivoli, WebSphere, etc.

How would your strategy change if you only planned to have one product in the next few years?

Good question. This is an area that I've only recently started doing a lot of thinking, and it's all still a bit "up in the air."

Two brands makes sense if they map to different market segments which require substantially different branding strategies, e.g. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (and yes I know these also have different feature sets) or Chevy and GMC (which do not have meaningfully different feature sets).

Sorry, I meant to write a different company name and product name for a company with one product, rather than brands.

Better phrased, my question should have been "Should a startup with one product, and no near future plans to add another, use the same name for the company and product?"

Having two names may create less friction as your company evolves, e.g. you can change the name of the company while keeping the name of the product, or change the name of the product, sell the irghts to distribute the product line to another company, or buy rights to another product .

While it's done all the time (see Obvious Corp and Twitter), one potential downside for a bootstrapped startup is that you'll need to make an extra effort to protect two names (trademarks, licenses, etc.).

So, aside from the (relatively low) addition admin and expense, you don't think it's confusing for a start-up with one product to promote two brands?

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