Brand strategy for unified communications: branded or non-branded?

When service providers evaluate the move from a traditional PBX/Unified Communications (UC) platform to cloud UC, one of the early decisions they encounter is brand strategy. After all, they have two choices:

1. Sell ​​under your own brand (e.g. you can white label UC products under your own brand); or
2. Selling someone else’s brand, or co-branding with a well-known brand

While there are several considerations here (particularly financial returns, but also ease of implementation and other operational elements), we just want to focus on the brand aspect.

First, here are some interesting excerpts from articles that provide background on the brand.

• Importance of product brandingThe article states: “By creating a strong, recognizable brand identity for their products, companies can increase customer recognition and loyalty. Products with strong brand recognition are more likely to be remembered by customers and chosen over competitors. This can improve market positioning and differentiation from competitors.” Differentiation is a key point here. The risk of reselling another brand is that it is not differentiated. It may be a good product, but others are selling the same thing, which leaves your only differentiation options with price and other soft elements such as reputation. White labeling may offer more flexibility to differentiate and stand out.
• What is White Label? What are its benefits? This blog will explain what white labeling is and how to use it to get to market quickly, reduce risk, and minimize development and maintenance. A key consideration for service providers (SPs) is the value of their own brand. If they are strong in certain markets or specific verticals, they may not need to take advantage of the additional overhead of selling someone else’s branded products.
• What is branding and why is it so important for your business? In this blog, there is a sentence: “Let’s be clear: Reputation is built whether the company takes action or not. The result can be a good reputation or a bad reputation. Understanding and using brand simply means that you are in control of the overall situation and try to control reputation.” The point here is, if your core brand is strong, do you need to resell another brand?

Now we are in post-functional server(1) In today’s world, service providers face some fundamental decisions when migrating to the cloud. Our perspective on reselling other UC brands vs. white labeling boils down to these key points:

• If you feel your core brand is strong, there is no reason to dilute it with another brand.
• Telecom professionals know all brands and place value on them. However, potential customers don’t! They trust you to be the expert and guide them to the right solution, regardless of the product brand name.
• It’s critical that your sales team become trusted advisors to your customers. Selling white label products arguably enhances this trusted advisor status because the company stands behind the UC solution with its brand.

At Intermedia, we enable service providers to brand our best-in-class UC solutions. To learn more, visit www.intermedia.com/resellers/service-providers.

(1) Functional Server: A server located in the SP network that provides hosted PBX and UC functions for enterprise customers