Question

Topic: Website Critique

*need Examples Of Software Parent/product Websites

Posted by amarcomperson on 7/14/2008 at 11:53 AM ET 500 Points
Hi,

I work for a software company. Currently our corporate website has nothing to do with our flagship product website ... they have been marketed separately for 20 years. Recently higher ups have been trying to tie the two together loosely.

I am about to redesign our flagship product website ... because I am in charge of marketing for this division. I know someone will inevitably suggest that I should make the product site more like the corporate site (which has a really bad design but I have no control over any of their marketing) I need some examples supporting my goal ... preferably software website examples where the product and the parent company websites are completely different. And any information you can provide that would help me in my plight!

Thanks,


A
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  • Posted by melissa.paulik on 7/14/2008 at 12:11 PM Member
    Aimee,

    I was in a similar position not too long ago. I saw the question not so much as a website issue as a branding issue. If you redevelop your flagship product website to mirror your corporate website, you're really saying that there is a benefit to having the corporate brand extend to your flagship brand.

    At the company I was working with at the time, there wasn't. The corporate site was really more of an investor relations site. The flagship brand had the established identity in the market. There was a link to the product pages from that site, but the look and feel was very different from the corporate site.

    We elected to not use the corporate site at all in any of our marketing initiatives so the messages to the market were very consistent in look and feel--but they weren't the same as the coporate site. Prospects and customers would rarely see the corporate site unless they made a conscious effort to go there.

    The other aspect that I fully admit factored into my decision was cost. The look and feel of the corporate site and the flagship product site were vastly different. I would have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars and a LOT of time moving everything over to a new look and feel.

    Cost is a factor, but clearly it can't be the only factor. If I removed the cost from the equation, it still made sense to have two different looks. However, cost was one of the things that I used to justify the decision to the owners of the business. Silly as it sounds, they didn't understand the branding issues, but hit them in the pocketbook and they got it.

    All the best!

    Melissa Paulik
    [URL deleted by staff]

  • Posted by amarcomperson on 7/14/2008 at 12:33 PM Author
    Melissa,

    Thanks for your answer ... yes your situation is very similar to mine ... not to mention that our parent company has other products and services that have nothing to do with our flagship product line.

    The pocketbook won't hit them because I know they are in the midst of a site redesign ... Our division wants to maintain the separate look/feel and just have the link to the parent site ... which is what we currently have.

    I know from past experience that this has been done but I need to be able to prove it by giving the higher ups some examples of other software companies have done the same thing ... and/or give them any stats that also support what I am trying to accomplish.

    Thanks,


    Aimee
  • Posted on 7/14/2008 at 7:30 PM Accepted
    There are lots of companies who don't merge their corporate sites with their product sites, for example.

    Unilever
    Proctor & Gamble
    Sony
    Pepsi
    Coke

    The last two are products unto themselves, but they are similar to the others because they own a vast array of products you would never have guessed belong to them.

    On the software side, Intuit markets Quicken, Quickbooks and Quick Tax as separately, although the corporate name is still present.

    These examples are marketed separately for exactly the reason Melissa mentions above, brand. The audience for each product is different, so merging them into one would be a disaster.

    I would use the target audience as the key to your argument. If they are as different as you are inferring, then it should be an easy point to make. No site can be all things to all people, and if you try it will be nothing to anybody. Pick your target and shoot for it.

    Best of luck.
    Eric
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 7/15/2008 at 9:13 AM Accepted
    If your company has its own URL, it has its own branding. Making it look like its parent (which has its own URL) won't help either of you.

    Here are 2 examples:
    Symphony Technology Group (https://www.symphonytg.com/group_companies/) owns Capco, Aldata, IRI, Lawson, Symphony Marketing Solutions, Symphony Metro, and Symphony Services.

    Microsoft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_acquired_by_Microsoft_Corpo...)

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