NetApp is a Well-Kept Secret. Time For That To Change.

Today, NetApp is launching a new “brand identity”. This includes a new logo, a new tagline, new messaging framework, a completely reworked corporate website -- the whole shebang. We are even changing our legal name from Network Appliance to NetApp. (For more details, see our new web site, this press release, and this podcast on the research behind our new brand.)

To understand our motives, you have to understand the relationship between brand and awareness. Awareness is about how many people are familiar with your company, and brand is about the stuff that you tell them in order to increase awareness. The new brand is the first stage of a new awareness campaign. Over the next few years, NetApp will spend tens of millions of dollars on awareness. Before we spend all that money, it only makes sense to get very clear about what -- exactly -- to tell people in all of those advertisements and customer programs!

At its heart, branding is about making promises. If you explain to people how your company can help them, the “brand promise”, then they can figure out for themselves whether to buy from you. (I wrote this blog entry about the idea of a brand as a promise.)

Based on past experience, I expect many readers -- especially technical ones -- to view this as so much marketing bullshit. Ironically, NetApp has never spent much on branding and awareness because our engineering-centric executive staff largely shared this view. We were skeptics! Other skeptics might like to hear why I’ve changed my view.

Since the goal of developing a new brand is to increase awareness, the most obvious question is why we think awareness is important. NetApp’s unaided awareness is less than 10%. Unaided awareness is when you ask potential customers to name all of the vendors that they would consider to solve a particular problem –- storage and data management in our case. Less than 10% of potential customers list NetApp. That means our unaided awareness is very close to our market share, which is also about 10%. Pretty much everyone who knows about NetApp is buying from us. Think about it: Everybody knows about EMC, but only a third of them choose to buy from EMC. Ten percent of people know about NetApp, and almost all of them choose to buy from us. Apparently, pretty much everyone who knows us likes us. Just imagine how well we could do if the other 90% knew what the 10% know!

One barrier to increasing awareness is that people call us so many different things: Network Appliance, NetApp, NetApps, Network Applications, Network Associates. What’s worse, our own material said both NetApp and Network Appliance. How can people remember you if they don’t even know your name? More people call us NetApp, and it’s shorter and easier to remember, so we decided to reduce confusion by legally changing the company name. Now we are NetApp. (FedEx did a similar rebranding in 1994.)

“Okay”, I hear the skeptic saying, “that makes sense, but did it really take expensive consultants to figure out that you need a single name and that you should start advertising?”

That’s fair, but other aspects of branding are trickier to get right. I said earlier that if you tell people what you do, then they can figure out for themselves whether to be customers, but it’s tricky to get the details right. Your explanation must be honest, clear, and relevant. If you aren’t honest about what you can do, customers will figure that out, and you’ll have a nasty backlash. If you aren’t clear, then people won’t understand what you are trying to say. Also, you must take a variety of audiences into account. Historically, we focused on the technical folks who use our products, but the higher-level business people who write the checks and make final decisions on vendor selection are equally important. Finally, you must be relevant. There are many true things that we could say about NetApp, but we want to share the true things that customers care about, that will make them want to buy from us. (Just to be clear, there is a profit motive here.) For our top level messaging, we also want to say true things that are of interest to both technical and business people.

Getting all this right takes careful research. We interviewed customers to hear why they buy from NetApp. We worked with industry analysts to validate customer input and to express the messages as clearly as possible. We did test marketing -– complete with one-way mirrors -– to see whether potential customers understood our messages, and whether they cared. (As an engineer, this whole process surprised me. It felt more like an engineering development project than I expected, complete with requirements, development, testing, debugging, milestones and everything.)

As part of the launch we are changing many things –- the logo, the tagline, the messages –- but we are not changing NetApp itself. Since we began, NetApp has changed from a small startup to a major IT vendor in enterprise data centers. The brand launch is not about driving more change; it is about introducing people to what NetApp has matured into, after fifteen years of successful growth.

NetApp has been a well-kept secret for too long, and we intend to change that.

Comments

[Andrew Miller]

Kudos on the rebranding and site redesign -- I agree it was definitely time for it -- I've said NetApp for a long time while never being quite sure if that was the right name or not. Two comments on the site though.

1) On the product pages where there are icons for Digg, del.icio.us & Technorati, there are no tooltip icons when you hover over them.

2) On the product pages, the tabs for "Overview", "Tech Specs", etc. each reload the page rather than being javascript....not quite as smooth/snappy for navigation as they could be.

But...very good overall IMHO so far from what I'm seeing (and as an existing customer who knew the existing site pretty well, I'm probably the hardest demographic to please).

[DeeJay]

Congratulations to NetApps. A comment and a question.

What I see in the data management business is, even though an initial appeal can be honest, clear and relevant, the pitches to management start with a high degree of relevancy, but then quickly become technical.

This could be seen by management—the guys writing the checks—as helping to commoditize the business. If management can’t appreciate the technical talk, the pitch loses its relevance. So, a NetApps pitch can seem the same as a pitch from, say, EMC. That could leave management with the impression that data management is a commodity and could drive management to simply choose the least expensive supplier.

So, does NetApps have a plan to continue to engage management past the introduction stage and into more of a sustained dialog with the executives setting strategy and deciding where to invest their scarce resources?

[Dave replies:

Hey DeeJay, we just changed our name to "NetApp". No "s".

You raise a good point: When you are selling to business people, it can be a mistake to descend quickly into technical talk. Better focus on their business problems, and how you can help solve them, if you want them to invest their scarce resources with you. I agree completely.

This is hard to do, but we've been working at it, and we will keep working.]

[Hoomi]

Doesn't the logo look like Stonehenge?

Staying with the Spinal Tap theme would it have been better to change your tag line to "All our filers go up to 11"...

[Dave replies: We were thinking more of the Arc de Triomphe than Stonehenge, but I wonder whether Stonehenge is a very, very old version of the triumphal arch?]

[Tom]

http://www.netapp.com/us/company/our-story/

You hide "EVOLVE" in the bit field, why not
a less subtle message like: "RESISTANCE IS FUTILE" :)

I hate the new logo but then again, I hated the original
logo, at first...

[Russ]

Congrats on the rebranding and nice post. Clear, honest, hopefully relevant to all...fits right in with your new brand promise. Maybe you have a new career as a branding consultant?

[prabhushankar]

Hi

The new branding is good and also the new web site look very good. I would like to know the rationale of choosing new LOGO? What is the meaning of it? What it represents? How it represents NetApp as one?

Thanks

[Dave replies: Since there were lots of questions on the Logo itself, I decided to write a whole blog entry on the subject. See the March 18th entry.]

[rk]

I can understand the tag line. For the life of me, I cannot understand the logo and the color scheme. Portraying trains thru tunnels, people making shapes and building frameworks in the logo format is cool - but they serve to make a point - which is what ?

pray tell.

[DD]

That beating heart on the home page is fairly repulsive, scary, and downright creepy when you mouse-over it.

It also doesn't blend with the clean look of the rest of your site.

Was beating blue nasty heart field-tested?

Suggest moving to a more symbolic heart than an anatomically correct one.

[Jay Ferracane]

First off kudos for embracing the importance of brand in todays business world. Honest, clarity and the importance of messaging. Hooray. It's a shame there aren't more in technology centric based businesses who are taking advantage the strategic power of brand and branding and the results it can have on things like awareness. In you're mention of Brand and Awareness...it seems a critical detail wasn't discussed.

You mention "At its heart, branding is about making promises." I think you may have semantically mis-spoke. It should be "brand (no -ing) is about making promises". I'll go farther and say that the promise of any brand today goes beyond simple words. Brand is the promise about the experience with your services or goods. Now comes "branding". Branding is the delivery mechanism for conveying said promise/experience and the result is awareness. in your recent blog article "about the idea of a brand as a promise." is more to the point. "Branding", is a catalog of elements, the vehicles that help deliver the promise and make it recognizable. Like your new identity, love it or hate it, it is still a relatively subjective symbol (to some) that just happens to one, albeit a very important one, of your delivery vehicles. If it does it job well...it communicates or leads the world to your promise. Hell branding is the paint finish on your hardware. It is the way you send manuals to customers. It is even the way you answer the phone.

To be clear here, your brand is not a logo, that's branding. In todays day and age, your brand is really about the promise of the experience that those who interact or come across your brand can expect. Individuals, groups and companies interact with your brand in many places. Online, offline, inline...they happen everywhere. and they all the time, 24/7.

I am not discounting the role of awareness...it's critical that folks know who you are and understand what you do, clearly and honestly, but I think that is more of an objective. I think the goal of any brand, new or old should be something much bigger than awareness or recognition. Awareness can simply be " I seen this before, move on." Recognition can be "I know these guys, cant remember what they do. But good brands deliver an experience. These experiences are can be long or short termed, deep or shallow, but they are always on some level emotional, when you really think about it.

I like to use the analogy of a bad restaurant. If you go to restaurant and have a terrible experience, you may tell a someone about it. You may even caution them about eating there. If you go to another restaurant and have a great experience, you may tell a few friends, but it will be with great intensity. You will return and bring others. Wanting them to share in the experience you've come to expect. That's just how we as humans are wired. We depend on experiences. Promises, could be defined as packets or items of dependency. Experiences and far more connective than any logo or mark could ever be.

Anyway, I applaud your new appreciation for a cause that I have been leading for more than 10 years. I have had my fair share of converting engineers and hardcore business folks to believers in brand and branding.

[Kevin Closson]

Does this mean I have to do global text replacements for all my Oracle on NFS related blog entries, such as:

http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/my-blog-posts-prove-oracle-doesnt-support-nfs/

[Dave replies: When it's convenient for people to change old references to "Network Appliance", that's great, but I understand that there's no way that we'll change all the old references to "NetApp". The old name will fade away over time.]

[Passerby]

And this guys your sister company?:

http://www.novatio.nl/

[Kris (not with NetApp)]

As a marketing communications professional with over 15 yrs of experience, I find it surprising that exactly when the company is launching a new name, the "NetApp" typeface is subsumed by a monolith and ancient image reminiscent of Stonehenge in your new logo. I think the name change is overdue and a good move, but the execution of your good strategy is pretty poor. And moving on the the "does your business have a heart?" campaign... I'm not sure that US slang carries well across to your global markets, and the sickly looking heart with a lot of "catheters" sticking out of it is just plain ugly and off-putting... Sorry to be harsh, but you are a major global corporation and could have done better than this... If I were the competition, I'd be smirking.

[RO]

I'm afraid I'll have to agree. I love NetApp products (I'm a happy customer), but the logo is ugly, uninspiring, lacking any aesthetics. What should I feel when I look at it? I fear it is going to be put on all the new NetApp products in the future, uglifying our nice racks? The colors: white on blue background is bland, boring and uninspiring. Furthermore, I completely agree with the creepy heart. I also don't understand the tagline: "Does your business have a heart?" For me, a technical guy, it just have to work - like Apple works in the desktop space, so NetApp works in the storage space (can you see some tasteful design ideas there?). For the business decision makers in the company I work for, the business with a heart does not tell them anything. They know the role of a storage system - it's about what is the difference between you and your competitors. What do you offer that is unique? Definitely, a heart argument is leaving them cold. But again, as the previous commenter showed, I'm from Europe with English as my second language, so that might explain my lack of understanding.

People that made your site also launched it with links not working properly (see the link from now.netapp.com to Certification). That's embarrassing.

I know the design and branding consultants already milked you of a lot of money, so our complains are futile -you'll leave it like this nevertheless, but please, just look again at the train tunnel image (that perhaps symbolizes your new logo): do you see any light in that tunnel? Would you really want to go in there? Is this the way to inspire more confidence in the company? I would double-check if those marketing consultants aren't on the payroll of your competition. Just my 2c.

[John]

"Oh, it's a profit deal!" -- Steve Martin in The Jerk

[Albert K]

NetApps rocks! The new logo and tagline doesn't

[nusk]

NetApp looking to Re-Brand and formalize its pet name is Good & Excellent in getting new Brand Identity.
But, why the Blue Color? Most of the TOP IT Vendor's around the world have their logos/name in BLUE.
Why didnt NetApp think of some Bold and Agressive Color to go with its New Brand Identity & "Go further, faster" tagline !!

[Tony Asaro]

Smart move. The key will be whether it is supported throughout the organization and is a major initiative. Seems like this is the case.

Also - please return my emails ;)

[Harry R]

Old NetApp logo was ... just better. Sorry

[NetApp Fan]

I too feel that the old logo was good....

[Dave replies: I love the old logo! I think the new one is a better symbol for NetApp today, but I really did like the design of that old logo. See my March 18 blog entry.]

[veetarag]

Nice to see the new look website and the logo. The current logo looks solid, seems more logical, and goes with the times too. The older one did not make much sense.

I used to work with NetApp about an year ago, and I've always thought why this great company has not been investing on brand buliding and awareness.

The confusion regarding the brand name has to be cleared, and all names other than "NetApp" have to be erased from public memory. It is tough, but NetApp will surely get there soon with this initiative!

Really glad to see all these developments:)

~veetarag

[Tony Spaeth]

Good job, Dave. We note your link to the FedEx case on the Corporate Brand Matrix site. We'd like to add the NetApp case as well, if you will confirm our entries. I'll be in touch.