Ask HN: have you ever marketed the same product under two different names?

Yes - it works spectacularly well for a lot of software. Spolsky said that most customers only use 10% of any program's features, just not the same 10%. This presents you with a real marketing problem. Selling the same product under different names allows you to tailor the marketing messages to particular verticals or use-cases.

I did some work recently for a company doing SaaS for small businesses. Their product was quite easy to use but difficult to sell, with a huge number of pre-sales enquiries about whether the product would suit a particular business. A lot of work went into improving the website to answer that kind of question, but nobody really bothered reading any of it.

Eventually, they bought a couple of hundred domain names and wrote unique copy for each, emphasising benefits and savings specific to a particular business. The product itself was identical across all the branded sites. Sales skyrocketed, covering the cost of that work within a matter of hours. Every part of the funnel improved substantially - more search traffic, better ad click-through, cheaper clicks, lower bounce rate, better conversion. Curiously, there was also a marked improvement in retention.

This is done in consumerland. I remember 30 years ago when my first child was born, I looked into diaper services. There were dozens, but when I dug deeper they were all fronts for one or two firms. If you look at laundry detergent, they all come from a small number of firms.

It might even work on the consumer side of the internet, e.g. generic dating site, dating site for jews, christians, academics, CS (good for girls looking for intelligent hard working husbands, not so good for guys ;-).

However it wouldnt work so well for technical/business products. Can you imagine doing a technical evaluation for several products only to find the only difference among them was the logos.

Good point about laundry detergent. I remember in particular Procter&Gamble who was marketing Ariel and Vizir at the same time (in France). Similar packaging, same base product, similar pricing.

One thing I remember now is that they had (in the 80s-90s) introduced a little ball in which to pour your liquid detergent to put in the middle of your laundry. Both brands had it obviously, so I imagine that made the other brands look like they were lacking something.

Instead of having brand A with new unknown feature X, competing with brand B without X feature, you have two brands A1 and A2 with that feature and B without. I'd expect consumer to start thinking "well these two brands have it, so that must be good". Instead of comparing A and B, they're now comparing A1 and A2 instead.

Clever.

I'm not sure either how well two brands could work for tech/business products, but I wouldn't be surprised if the above example with the specific feature could work a bit: if you're trying a different approach to a problem but bring it through two brands, in a way it validates the approach. (if you don't know better)

There is a whole group of website part of Bharat Matrimony (site where parents find life partners for their sons/daughters) catering to the particular regions/languages in India - bengali, tamil, kannada, telugu, etc. Each on its own domain.

There are also separate sites for various religions and some exclusive sites like Privilege Matrimony, Elite Matrimony, DivorceeMatrimony, Defence Matrimony, etc.

Check out http://www.bharatmatrimony.com/

> I can find plenty of reasons why it would be a terrible idea: brand dilution

If you are trying to pitch the same product to two different markets, creating a second branch would prevent brand dilution.

I highly recommend Ries and Trout's book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (and Marketing Warfare). They argue strongly against "brand extension" (e.g. Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero).

And it's a technique of price discrimination as well as it allows customers to select higher price or lower price differentiating on packaging or other perceptions they might hold.

Here is more on how/why it is done in consumer markets: http://www.mbs.edu/home/jgans/mecon/value/segment%204_4.htm

Versioning (second-degree price discrimination)

In second-degree price discrimination, firms typically offer a list of different prices to consumers, allowing the consumers to self-select. In versioning pricing strategies, companies sell variations of a product or service at different prices to different groups of customers. Ideally, companies want to charge what consumers are willing to pay thereby maximising company revenues. But it is difficult to know precisely how much each person is willing to pay. Companies therefore create versions of a product to appeal to different types of buyers. Customers then choose the version that best meets their needs.

Businesses often distribute a physically identical product under different brand names, charging lower prices for the less known brand name. For example, the Gap Company sells its products with the Gap label at its own stores as well as under other labels at other retail stores.

> They argue strongly against "brand extension" (e.g. Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero).

What a strange example to use in that case, namely because it's successful. Diet Coke was marketed to the calorie-conscious, and later when they discovered that "Diet" didn't sell well to men, they came up with Coke Zero. Sure, there's some cannibalization, but also more market share. All of that doesn't look like it's hurt the Coke brand in the least.

Brand extension has worked well in starting to transition the UK across to digital radio, too, as argued (by someone other than me) in this blog post: http://james.cridland.net/blog/its-all-in-the-brand/

Rather than filling the dial with unknown names, like "The Groove", "BBC 7" and "Liquid" as they tried (and failed) in the early 2000s, broadcasters have transitioned to using extensions of familiar names.

If you already know and enjoy Absolute Radio, or BBC Radio 4, on your FM radio, you're more likely to try out Absolute Classic Rock, or Radio 4 Extra on your shiny new digital set. Good, well-targeted extensions can only help widen the reach of any particular brand rather than dilute it.

I guess my Coke example wasn't that great. A better example might be Volkswagen.

VWs have always been marketed as reliable, inexpensive cars (literally, the "people's car"). VW also owns Audi, which are (somewhat) higher-end cars. One company with two respected and differentiated brands. In recent years, though, VW has been try to upscale the VW brand with $50K SUVs and sedans. They are diluting the VW brand ("A $50K VW?!") and cannabalizing their Audi brand.

cf. Honda/Acura and Toyota/Lexus.

We've never tried it before, but we've thought about it. We've decided not to do this, because it would be too expensive, and take too much time. This means you'll spend 2X money and time on marketing for the same product with different names. It already takes quite some time and money to build product awareness for one product with one product name.

In my opinion, this is something you should do in case you're a big company and have a lot of money.

I think if you want to do A/B testing you just have to create different landings pages that discuss a different problem. On each landing page you explain how your product solves a specific problem.

Is there a specific reason why you want to do this?

I'm currently trying to decide between two names and tried a little AdWords campaign to see if there was a significant difference in click-through rate just based on the name. (result so far: there's a little one but not huge)

I started to wonder what effects launching both names could have. But I'm by myself for now, so this is pretty much out of the question.

I also realize that a name doesn't make or break a product/company. But since I need to pick a name, I started to think about that.

Of course, it has the significant advantage that the code has to be designed to accommodate 2 names.

I was thinking A/B testing too when I saw the headline.

This seems something better to do earlier rather than later, especially if you're looking for repeat business, as you can alienate those who liked the old name. This can be dangerous even for logos. (Look at the Gap and Starbucks for issues there.)

Yes, I totally agree. It is important to do this early on.

Also, make sure you can buy the domain name, because this is really important for your google ranking. Also, I would prefer to use a name which does not have any meaning. In this way, you'll never have problem with semantics. Think about the problem of Nokia's new cell phone Lumia ;-)

It's pretty easy to reskin an app.. I'll usually at least add an extra feature or something though.

(Kind of related/fun fact: Most sunglasses are made by the same company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica )

For something you are marketing/selling directly, it is not effective to hedge with two names to the same market/consumer. Even if each name pulls slightly better in different ways, you are losing a potentially larger market that needs to be hit with an exposure threshold to your brand before they buy (lookup 'advertising rule of seven'). Also very confusing when customers who reference each other as part of purchase process are using different named versions.

In almost all cases, better to have a single brand, then test different marketing or solution approaches to placing that brand.

Related: brand proliferation, when one company creates many (somewhat different) products in one niche and invests heavily in advertising. (example: Cereals). This increases the barrier for entry for new players onto this market by effectively saturating the market with a wide variety of products. Economies of scale also help – e.g. if you're one big company it's easier to negotiate with retailers. Usually done by FMCG companies.

I've known companies to do this to get around Google slap issues with products, yes. Typically, in the affiliate world.

In that space, once you've found a winning product (ie. tons of sales), it makes sense to replicate under a different brand/imagery - not to compete, but to actually advertise on Adsense (for example) without 'duplicate content' penalties.

I don't have to like it, but it is a winning strategy in that space.

My ex's father ran a catering company in a small city with 3 different names. One was kosher, and the other two were just different brands.

No, but I am about to.

I recently launched my already a niche product and found a possible niche of that. It caters to a completely different market (one being designers, the other being disabled people)

you can read about my first month here http://www.000fff.org/incomereport

Your graphs need work.

What you've got is a series of linear ranges at different orders of magnitude. The peak in the middle of the x range is probably smaller than the Forrst peak, while the area under the HN peak is probably larger than everything else together. The graph does not communicate any of this clearly.

If you want to do pseudolog, use 1-2-5-10. But if you're using Excel, you can just right click on the axis, choose format axis, and tick "logarithmic scale."

thnx!

I remember a story about a business man who imported one quality of socks from China. He then branded one product as a high quality(expensive) and the other as a low quality(cheap) product. Then he would sell both batches to supermarket chains across the country, making millions....

Yes, we do this right now. Three of our web properties sell effectively the same collection of products, but with different branding, somewhat different pricing, and different target demographics. Most of our efforts target just a few main properties, so the marginal resources allocated to the "lesser" properties don't negatively impact our focus to a notable degree.