Cisco Chairman John Chambers either accidentally gave away some future plans or pulled the old “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes” maneuver last week when he talked about doing away with the Linksys brand name. Since Chambers isn’t known to make mistakes in public forums all that often, I’m betting on the flagpole ploy.
Recent articles indicate Cisco is backing off doing away with the Linksys name. Since Linksys serves the small business and consumer market, far away from Cisco’s enterprise customers, I believe the Linksys brand should be kept. It’s hard to build a brand name with a reputation as good as Linksys has, and Cisco has some serious work to do to build name recognition in the small business market.
When small businesses hear “Cisco” they think big and expensive, two terms that make them nervous. When small businesses hear “Linksys” they think good value, good products, and hope they outgrow them someday. Consumers don’t think about Cisco until they see that ridiculous commercial pitching $100,000 video conferencing systems so second graders can have staring contests, then they think “not with my school taxes.”
Dumping a great brand name in a valuable market doesn’t make much sense, but corporate ego rarely does. If Cisco says bye-bye to the Linksys name, it may mean they’ve completely lost touch with their market. How do you successfully mix the Cisco “big and important” product line with the Linksys “affordable and pretty good” line and not cheapen the Cisco name? I guess we’ll wait until the Cisco corporate ego decides what happens next.
