I like brands that use an animal in their name. Survey Monkey is one of the most famous brands out there in the Internet space. Today an article on Forbes said they are rebranding to Momentive. There is an active website on Momentive.com so they went with Momentive.ai.
Today, the company is announcing plans to relaunch under the new name Momentive, which will become both the parent company and the brand name for its growing enterprise business. The company also plans to introduce MNTV as the new ticker symbol on June 15 while SurveyMonkey will continue to exist for the consumer-facing self-serve business as a subsidiary of Momentive.
The article goes on to address the reasons why they are rebranding. It also shows the power of the Survey Monkey brand.
A separate enterprise survey of 3,000 people in the U.S. and UK found that 66% of people had tried SurveyMonkey at some point. And a name sentiment survey of 6,014 people revealed that the brand’s popularity was on-par with Google and Salesforce but not aligned with enterprise software.
You can read the whole story on Forbes.
“There is an active website on Momentive.com so they went with Momentive.ai.”
Oh dear, like watching a car crash in slow motion.
They are a company with means, they could afford a solid .com, but if you want to go non com route, you can’t pick a name where there is a developed business on the .com. In my opinion.
The decision looks like a complete cluster. Momentive.com isn’t very good so going with momentive.ai is peak stupidity.
It’s a huge mistake rebranding to something other than .com for a well-established company. They will suffer because of this. At least for a while.
Of all the names in the world, they went with something not very easy to remember and without the .com!
Expertsystem.com and Graphcore.com have already rebranded their .com to .ai.
I expect to see that trend to continue.
Moving from ExpertSystem.com to Expert.ai is not like moving from SurveyMonkey.com to Momentive.ai IMO.
I consider the first case to be a real upgrade. Moving to an “easy to remember” name and the name describes their business. However, in the second case, it doesn’t do either.