As part of its rebranding strategy, Sage announced in October 2011 that its MAS 90, MAS 200, and MAS 200 SQL product lines will now be called Sage 100. This is a new branding strategy for the company in an effort to align its product brand in North America with its UK-based European division. With a wide range of product lines, the enterprise software giant wants to streamline all of its software solutions under its company name, which is Sage. For the company, this is an excellent strategy, but does it really create a positive impact for its partners and end users?

Analyzing the rebranding strategy from a marketing point of view

The brand is one of the most crucial factors in identifying a product. It takes a lot of effort to establish a brand. This includes building a positive reputation for a brand that creates identity for a certain product and separates it from its competitors. Experts believe that a well-established brand should not change easily as it can create a huge impact in the market. In the case of Sage’s leading ERP solutions, namely MAS 90, MAS 200 and MAS 200 SQL, changing their names to a suite of products known as Sage 100, as expressed by many partners, is not a smart move.

The term MAS stands for Master Accounting Series. This is the top of the line accounting software since the early 1990s, capturing a huge market share in both Europe and America. Over the years, it went beyond its accounting functionality and evolved into enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. That said, the MAS product lines have not only established themselves as a brand for over 20 years, but have also captured a significant share of the ERP market. The brand name has already been sponsored and endorsed by CPAs, bookkeepers, IT and business professionals in many countries. It has also laid a solid foundation in the industry and changing the name could create a bit of confusion. MAS customers will continue to search for and use the term MAS instead of Sage 100 whenever they talk about the product.

Rebranding Affects Partners’ Search Engine Marketing

Because ERP software is a very expensive product, software resellers (partners) choose the business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy to distribute the software to customers, who are mostly small and medium-sized businesses. The sales cycle can sometimes take anywhere from a few months to over a year to close. Because of this, most MAS resellers take advantage of SEO to market the product over the internet. The MAS 90 and MAS 200 brands are already optimized as keywords on many websites and changing them to Sage 100 can hurt your SEO efforts and market visibility on the internet.

Any SEO professional knows that optimizing keywords to rank high in search engine searches takes a lot of effort. Changing the name to Sage 100 means these software resellers have to start from scratch and optimize for a new keyword. Selling software online through SEO is one of the main strategies of many large resellers and this rebranding strategy can make a big impact.

The new rebranding strategy

Sage 100 Standard will now be the new name for MAS 90, Sage 100 Advance will now be the new name for MAS 200, which is a client-server version of MAS90, and Sage 100 Premium will be the new name for MAS 200 SQL. However, the functionality and features of these solutions will not change, except as normal with updates and upgrades.

It would be like General Motors saying that we no longer want to call it Corvette but the new name will be C-100. Sorry, but people will still be looking for a Corvette, not a C-100, no matter how much you want it. Even when Microsoft acquired Great Plains, Solomon, Navision, and Axapta, they did some rebranding of Microsoft per se, but still kept the name intact because the names were already known to the general public. (ie Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains or Dynamics GP for short).

Is this rebranding a really good strategy for an established brand? Only Sage Software and resellers can tell. If the company will lose market share and resellers will decrease their income, this shows that it is a bad move. The new Sage 100 product lines will ship beginning in October 2012, and only after that date will answers be found.