Re: Best practices for domain change / major re-branding

From: Cliff Kurtzman <moderator_at_o-a.com>
Date: Tue 31 Aug 2004 13:32:14 -0500

Scott Allen wrote:

>I am an author of a book to be published next spring. For quite some time,
>my co-author and I have been maintaining a website at
>OnlineBusinessNetworks.com. We have been waiting for a final decision on
>our book title by our publisher, which we now have, and we are planning to
>move our site to the new domain, TheVirtualHandshake.com.

<snip>

>2. What issues do I need to consider on the marketing side, i.e., any tips
>regarding re-branding?
>
>I'm betting that Cliff has a few words on this, based on his recent
>experience switching from Tenagra to Adastro. Anyone else have any
>experience with this and some advice to share?

My experience was a bit different than this... I was not just
changing domains, I was completely changing business models
and identity. In doing so I wanted to leverage some aspects
of Tenagra's positive accomplishments (a sound track record
of ground breaking innovation and projects supporting some of
the largest brands in the world) while otherwise trying to
take ADASTRO to an entirely new level and generally get away
from the notion that I was running a company focused on web
development.

Tenagra's brand was very well established. For a company that
at its largest was around 30 people, it had a huge reputation
as an industry leader. But the bottom line was that the
business model behind the company no longer seemed interesting.
The profits were no longer there, and the opportunities for
true and intellectually stimulating innovation (the kind that
keeps an ex-rocket scientist's interest) were few and far
between. As competitors were shutting down like crazy, an
opportunity was potentially there for Tenagra to step into the
void and scale up if and when the economy improved. But doing
so would have required a tremendous investment, at a time in
which no one seemed willing to take any such risks.

So I decided to go another direction... one that allowed my
organization to offer services at a completely new level, and
that seemed to have a much greater upside potential in the
long run. Tenagra was so strongly associated with online
marketing that trying to rebrand Tenagra under a new mission
and identity seemed foolish. It was much easier to start a
new business with a clean slate, and go from there. For the
first year and a half, I intentionally avoided even building
a web site for ADASTRO... there was just a single undesigned
page up with basic information about the company. My web
design team was gone, and I wanted it to be clear I was no
longer in that business. As much for my own peace of mind in
help me make a break from elements of the past, as well as
to shape the associations that people had of my new
organization, I deliberately avoided a focus on online
marketing.

It is now a year and a half later. ADASTRO has been profitable
over that entire time, and the projects we've been involved
in have been continually interesting and intellectually
challenging. We work directly with CEOs, and have a chance to
build value for clients on a much greater level than Tenagra
ever did. With the kind of projects we undertake, the value
that we can add to clients' businesses is in the hundreds of
thousands if not millions of dollars. The service we provide
really cannot be commoditized in the way that web development
has been, and the margins on our services have the potential
to be significantly greater. And ADASTRO has now established
a sufficiently strong identity of its own that I'm no longer
terribly concerned about associations with online marketing
activities.

That lays the framework with which to get back to your
question... in our case, we didn't want to redirect people
from tenagra.com to adastro.com, because that would have
caused people to potentially think that they were the same
organization, and they were in reality completely different
companies. We also didn't want to go out and request link
changes... we would not have wanted ADASTRO to have taken
Tenagra's place in a directory of web development firms,
for example. Yet, we did want to leverage on the considerable
traffic going to http://www.tenagra.com (and
http://www.year2000.com, which I also own as well). So we put
up the pages that you can see on those sites, giving a brief
explanation of what was going on, introducing them to ADASTRO,
and including a link to http://www.adastro.com . Both
tenagra.com and year2000.com continue to be very strong
traffic draws for adastro.com to this day, but in a way that
makes it clear that they are very different companies.

--Cliff

Clifford R. Kurtzman
CEO | Moderator
ADASTRO Incorporated | The Online Advertising Discussion List
http://www.adastro.com | http://www.o-a.com







Received on Tue Aug 31 2004 - 13:32:14 CDT