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RealNetworks,
a leading Internet media delivery company based in Seattle, had
been so successful in reinforcing the "Real" brand, that almost
every one of its names contained the word "Real"—which made
it difficult for customers to tell the difference between consumer
products and services, business-to-business products and services,
and underlying technologies. Our brand architecture is straightforward,
and flexible enough to accommodate future products and services.
Marketing emphasis is now focused on a small number of proprietary
product and service family brands.
Master-McNeil had an ongoing relationship with Cisco
Systems for branding strategy management and name development.
In 1994, we created the Cisco brand architecture, which remains
in place today, and continued to work with Cisco for six years on
new name development and naming strategy issues. Our architecture
emphasizes and builds on the Cisco brand by allowing only descriptive
naming, accommodating the exponential growth at Cisco during the
course of our relationship. Since architecture implementation we
have worked with Cisco to create hundreds of descriptive names as
well as proprietary key branding elements such as the Cisco Powered
Network ingredient brand.
Procket Networks'
seasoned executives decided to put a brand architecture in place
prior to releasing the first product of this young company. Their
proactive vision will enable all marketing resources to be applied
in a strategic manner, rare among start-ups.
Cadence Design Systems is
the world leader in electronic design automation software. Our brand
architecture for Cadence was created to simplify their entire product
line, which had rapidly grown to encompass eight product categories.
This included over a hundred names, several dozen of which were
trademarked. Our brand architecture simplifies the Cadence product
line by grouping products into six branded product families; individual
products within each family receive descriptive names only. Master-McNeil
then created five new sub-brand names; this structure allows Cadence
to focus its marketing efforts on a few proprietary key sub-brands.
For this leader in information management and storage, Master-McNeil
developed an innovative, collaborative brand architecture process.
Taking advantage of StorageTek
resources, we "employed" StorageTek senior marketing and branding
managers as our own project staff. Together we developed brand architecture
alternatives, refinements, and the brand architecture now in place.
Navision,
a Danish-based European software company focused on integrated
business solutions, wanted to clarify and articulate its use of
product, service, program, and event logos. Creating guidelines
for third party use was also an issue. Our recommendations establish
a hierarchy that emphasizes the corporate name, while reducing
the number of allowed logos and making clear distinctions among
the company's different offerings, and those of third parties.
Akamai,
a provider of outsourced e-business infrastructure services and
software, wanted to establish guidelines for naming all aspects
of its business - from its platform, product families, product
suites, and technologies, to its partner programs and the offerings
within those programs. Our recommendations led to their adoption
of naming policies requiring the use of highly descriptive terminology
which reinforces the Akamai brand.
Brio,
the leading provider of next-generation business intelligence
tools, wanted to make sure that its product naming policies and
tagline messaging were in synch. Our brand architecture emphasizes
the products, rather than their components, and reinforces the
focus on "business performance software."
As a result of our work, Intraspect,
a leading maker of inter-enterprise collaboration software, decided
to not create and support multiple proprietary product names.
To help Intraspect reach their conclusion we created a variety
of brand architectures, illustrating the pros and cons of the
various approaches. Committing to this brand architecture now
and eliminating other naming options will save Intraspect time
and money as the company continues to grow.
Master-McNeil created the corporate brand architecture for Sun
Microsystems. We have continued our brand architecture implementation
at Sun with the development of highly detailed product identification
architectures for several Sun divisions. Among our names created for
Sun are the Sun Ray enterprise appliances product family, the Sun
Blade workstations, and the Sun Fire family of servers.
Master-McNeil conducted over 60 creative and strategic projects
for Apple, including
brand architecture for its imaging and desktop product lines. For
the implementation of this architecture we created many product
and technology brands, including (among others) Macintosh Classic,
Performa, StyleWriter, FinePrint, and AtEase.
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