It was only a few months ago at Sage Summit that Sage North America CEO Pascal Houillon announced the end of product brand names, which will be phased out and renamed during the next 18 months in a new branding strategy. The new strategy will focus on strengthening the Sage brand by qualifying some of Sage’s popular product offerings in a series, organized by ascending numbers.

It’s a strategy that already has had success in Europe, originally in France and then also in English-speaking countries like the UK and Ireland. The products themselves remain unchanged except for their label as Sage’s Simply Accounting and Peachtree, for example, become Sage 50 Accounting, and Accpac becomes Sage 300 (see the table below for other changes).

During, and immediately after the announcement (through Twitter and questions from Sage’s business partners) polarizing opinions emerged regarding this move. Questions of costs to business partners, repetitive efforts in customer product education, brand dilution and cannibalism, and those expressing concerns regarding change were understandably predominant amongst business partners. From Sage’s point of view, these concerns are all addressed through long-term objectives and all encompassing explanations of the future of its marketing strategy, one that is focused on dynamically placing the Sage brand in the minds of customers in the marketplace. By investing heavily in a single and unified brand (as opposed to 40 different product brands), Sage will save time and money for business partners who have to devote concerted effort in selling their own reseller brand, the Sage brand, and then the product brand.

A unified brand strategy will, hopefully, make it easier and less stressful for customers to move along the product lines, in accordance to their needs without having to drastically backtrack in the buying cycle and familiarize themselves with differently named products. In an arena where competitors’ brands like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Epicor are more recognizable than their respective products, Sage can argue that their strategy is in compliance with industry standards, and that all parties involved stand to gain from a strong common image and recognition in the market place.

One aspect that has not been completely clarified, and seems to contradict business intuition, is how, if at all, is the brand value accumulated over time by product brands being harnessed? Are the benefits from solidifying the Sage brand really worth all the product brands that will soon cease to exist?

All in all, the changes are significant in that they affect some of Sage’s more popular product groups, eliminating historically attained brand equity, while allowing over half of existing products to keep their old brands. Here’s is a small sample of the products that will experience change in the coming months (here’s a little bit of a summary of the changes):

With all changes, especially those with a global corporate scale, comes resistance and mixed emotions, even though the products themselves are not changing at all. How will this rebranding affect your business and perception of Sage products?

Top image by Stuart Miles.