Branding is so important to the long-term success of a business, especially in competitive markets such as hosting and software. Everyday I research the latest news in the hosting and software industries (actually more than just those two, but for this post, I focus on hosting and software only). Today I came across a news announcement stating that Webmail.us, the mail division of Rackspace, changed its name to Mailtrust. Was the name change a great move on their part?

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You bet it was. Why? Their goal, according to the Mailtrust Blog, says "the new name better reflects our commitment to business email hosting and building trust with our customers." They are right on. Webmail.us does not in any way imply trust or commitment. Instead, it suggests a more generic reference to a mail service and does not capture their intended target audience - businesses. Business email hosting is critical. There are many competitors out there with the strongest brands leading the way.

The way they announced the change other than a press release is reflected on their homepage at http://www.mailtrust.com. I think their graphic representation is brilliant. Easy to understand, easy to read. It just makes sense. And the slogan they included underneath the announcement says "Same Company. Same People. New Look." is an excellent endeavor to show customers that Mailtrust is still the same company, just more focused on building trust in their customers.

At first glance I thought, why not capitalize the "t" in Mailtrust, but then I realized they want to keep the same nomenclature as Rackspace by keeping the second word lower-case. Would MailTrust work better? Based on the success of Rackspace, it all comes down to great marketing and product/service performance. Clearly the team at Rackspace knows how to build a brand so I trust their decision to keep the "t" lower-case should work just fine.

Maybe in the future I can secure an interview with Pat Matthews, President of Mailtrust, and see what kind of impact the new name and merge with Rackspace has had on the company. Pat also maintains a great blog, "Small Town, Big Ideas" at http://patsweblog.com.

Tags: Mailtrust, Rackspace, Webmail.us

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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