Jas Business Blog

A good piece of technology and a bad piece of branding – that is my view on Adobe Acrobat Connect.

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today introduced the Adobe® Acrobat® Connect™ software product line, the first web conferencing and collaboration solution to offer “always-on” personal meeting rooms. The product line, consisting of Adobe Acrobat Connect and Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional, enables knowledge workers to instantly connect online with nothing more than a web browser and the ubiquitous Flash® Player software.

Source: Adobe press release

With Connect, Adobe had introduced a new (re-branded) product line: Adobe Connect (hosted) and Adobe Connect Professional (hosted and on-premise). This product was part of Macromedia paraphernalia when it was acquired by Adobe in 2005-06 with the name Macromedia Breeze, which further was acquired as Breeze technology by Macromedia from Presidia. The product is based on Flash technology which has already made a mark and commands high availability paving way for higher acceptability.

The (re)branding though is a concern for many factors. First of all the product had already a decent acceptance in market as ‘Breeze’ so may confuse current users or people who know about it. Secondly the product has come out as an extension of Adobe Acrobat, a product which is widely known and has a very clear keywords attached to it – static page, non modifiable, preview file etc. All these keywords are not even closely related to this product. The very idea of a meeting or a discussion results in a document either modified or created, which is not possible with Acrobat. So it can be only used for plain discussion or presentation. If Adobe can integrate the solution with Photoshop or Illustrator like products of its, it may help production and print houses. Also Adobe may like to extend the Connect link to applications like Microsoft Office and browsers rather than just Acrobat.

For some brighter side points, unlike traditional web conferencing solutions, the Acrobat Connect products enable users to choose a simple and easy-to-remember web address for their online personal meeting room that is unique to them, much like a phone number or e-mail address . Accessing a personal meeting room is easy and instant, requiring little more than a web browser. Because there is no cumbersome software to download, knowledge workers can easily hold spontaneous, ad-hoc meetings that are virtually hassle-free to join.

Connect will have to fight for market share with products like webex and live meeting. According to Frost & Sullivan, Breeze had a 0.3% market share in 2007.

Below is the snapshot preview of Connect with various menus expanded to show case its features (which I have photoshopped to reflect features in single pic).

Though a nice product with great features, I must admit that though am a fan of Adobe’s thought process on the products, innovation and branding, the Acrobat -Connect combo doesn’t go down very well in synergy.

Who knows the brand the best? The brand manager? The guy who is managing sales through distribution channels? or the one who is not at all part of company – the consumer?

There have been cases that a big brand was forced to take back a change just because the consumer was not happy with the new offering. And mind it, when a brand has made its mark, it sure does a lot of research before launching the change in market as a perfect brand is made by hearts, by emotions and they get disturbed easier than a brain ofcourse!

Tropicana New packaging

Recently PepsiCo found it in Tropicana the hard way, almost 24 years after Coke learned it through New Coke. The PepsiCo Americas Beverages division of PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, and the previous version is being brought back.

Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke juice’s fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice and an orange-colored twist cap atop large cartons that is shaped like a halved orange.

Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.” This is what undersconsideration had to say about the brand – “This new packaging feels, at best, like a discount store brand with what looks like, again, at best, rights-managed stock photography if not outright royalty free. And the typography is, once more, at best, a lame derivative of how the British have lately exploited geometric sans serifs like Futura and Avenir to great results—here’s just one example of many.”

Tropicana Old packaging

But what is starking here is the role of Web2.0 means in these marketing effects. While it took months for Coke to understand that its new Coke taste was a flop, PepsiCo came to know about it in matter of days, thanks to blogging, twitter tweets, facebook and hate mail forwards on these channels. This November, many consumers used Twitter to criticize an ad for Motrin pain reliever and received responses within 48 hours from the brand’s maker, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, which apologized for the ad and told them it had been withdrawn!

Lesson for marketers? The same old one – brands rest in minds of people and not with the one who make the product/service.

Addendum
If you think it was only Tropicana packaging that PepsiCo tampered with in this tough time of recession, here is a food for thought, they even changed the packaging for Pepsi itself! And its not just the style of bottles or new funky colors, but they were bold enough to play around with the logo, in , I repeat, this tough time of recession!! Here are the visuals of what these guys did to a pretty neat brand…

New Pepsi Bottles