In September 2008, Schafer spoke to WHIR tv about the company's plans for the OpenSRS brand
An email Q&A with the WHIR, Tucows’ VP of product management and marketing breaks down some of the re-branding efforts the company has gone through in the last year.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In February, wholesale internet service provider Tucows (www.tucowsinc.com) held its quarterly earnings call, in which CEO Elliot Noss touched briefly on the large branding effort the company has undertaken over the last year.
While the name Tucows originally came from the company’s software download site, beginning in the very early days of the web, it had since come to refer to a wide – and potentially confusing – range of products and services aimed at disparate group of users.
Last year the company began a program of compartmentalizing some of those products into a set of more clearly divided brands, including OpenSRS (for its reseller services), Butterscotch (a new project – a video tutorial site for novice Internet users) and YummyNames (for its direct sales and aftermarket domain business).
In an email Q&A with the WHIR, Ken Schafer, Tucows’ VP of product management and marketing breaks down some of the re-branding efforts the company has gone through in the last year and helps to illustrate their intent.
WHIR: Tucows seems to have made a lot of really strong brand-related choices in the last year. Was there a specific mandate to accomplish certain things, or some over-arching philosophy?
Ken Schafer: Tucows is one of the oldest brands on the web. We’ve been around since before Google or Yahoo! or Netscape or pretty much any other Internet brand you can think of. For a marketer this is a blessing and a curse.
In the past we tried to leverage the early awareness of Tucows by associating the brand with more of our services. We therefore ended up with Tucows the company, Tucows the download site, Tucows the registrar, Tucows Reseller Services for the wholesale business, and Tucows Domain Portfolio for the domains we own. Making matters worse, within Tucows Reseller Services we had four services – Tucows Email Service, Tucows Domain Service, Tucows SSL Service, and Tucows Personal Names Service.
Then in retail we had Domain Direct, ItsYourDomain and NetIdentity.
Frankly, even within the company it was hard to tell what we were talking about sometimes.
And when we went out to talk to prospective customers they would get very confused about who we were and what we had to offer them.
We had to make a very hard decision last year – keep going down the unified brand path we’d been on or look at a multi-brand strategy so that we could address different audiences and customer segments with tailored brands, communications and web sites. We decided to do the later.
The impression I got from the earnings call was that you’re intending to focus all of the company’s various brands into a smaller number of specific buckets. Tucows has a lot of brands, but in some cases there is some overlap (between the software download site and the new Butterscotch content, for instance). Can you explain how those areas of focus shape up a bit?
KS: Today we have Tucows Inc. the company, Tucows the registrar, OpenSRS the wholesale business, Hover the retail operation, and YummyNames who manage our portfolio. These offerings are pretty clearly differentiated as was our intent.
Late last year we added Butterscotch.com to that mix. We had made several attempts to update the original tucows.com download site to make it more modern. By that I mean more solution-focused, more community-oriented and better able to take advantage of video in helping people understand the technology in general and the Internet specifically. What we found was that people had such a strong perception of tucows.com as a download site that we couldn’t fully realize that vision without a major rethink of the brand. That was the genesis of Butterscotch.
Over the next few years you’ll see tucows.com being folded into the Butterscotch brand and website and at that point I think we’ll have reached the place we’ve been heading for – unique and memorable brands that offer distinct services to specific audiences.
Similarly, you’ve taken steps to emphasize certain things under new (or revived) brands in the past year, be it OpenSRS or YummyNames. Can you describe the idea behind some of this new branding?
KS: Sure, let me focus on OpenSRS, Butterscotch and YummyNames.
OpenSRS is our reseller service. That was also the name of the service when it launched in 1999. When we decided we needed a separate brand for the reseller business we looked to the past and realized that OpenSRS had an incredible reputation in the reseller community that we had not capitalized on. We wanted to emphasize our longevity in the business and our focus on offering old-fashioned service so we envisioned the brand as it would have been in the fifties – often considered the heyday of great customer service.
Butterscotch was a reaction against the overly geeky approach that most technology sites have used in their branding. Our goal is to make the Internet easier for everyone, not just early adopters and technophiles. Butterscotch is more of a soft, inviting and definitely non-intimidating name that has been very successful in drawing in the audience we’re looking for.
YummyNames was also a very conscious decision to zig when our competition was zagging. Most domain portfolios have names appealing to domainers. While we want to reach this audience we knew the size and quality of our portfolio would attract them no matter what we called it, so we took this as an opportunity to find a brand that was appealing to marketers in general and ad agencies in particular. Our positioning of YummyNames is more as a niche agency that happens to have a large portfolio of names itself rather than another domainer with a large portfolio.
Some of these products would seem to serve very different audiences. Do you see your customers as falling into specific groups?
KS: Glad you see it that way because that was exactly the intent. Each brand is focused on serving the needs of a very particular audience.
In my mind (and I intend that to mean that I could conceivably be incorrect) Tucows is primarily a domain business. Does the company approach its business that way?
KS: Well, we’re the third largest registrar in the world and it is our biggest revenue maker, so in that sense it is our primary business, but I think of our approach as more diverse than that.
Certain of your products are sort of obviously supplemental to one another. Do you see everything under the Tucows umbrella as contributing toward some kind of overall goal, or is there some basic divergence?
KS: Our mission is to make the Internet easier. We’ve always believed that the Internet was the greatest agent for change the world has ever seen and we want to be sure that anyone who wants to contribute or benefit from that change can. We don’t want getting a web or email address or understanding technology stand in anyone’s way and through the various services we offer I think we now do a great job of helping different audiences find the tools they need.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
No related posts.
