Creating unity across a sprawling portfolio

How do you streamline a complex portfolio for greater clarity and cross-sell?

By refocusing on the primary brand, and simplifying naming across the business.

Services

Portfolio architecture
Portfolio naming strategy
Creative & product naming
Naming guidelines and toolkit

Opportunity

Cisco is a strong brand with high awareness, but years of innovation and acquisitions led to an overly complex portfolio. Different business units used different naming practices, which diluted the overall brand and confused customers about which offerings were actually from Cisco. This complexity also hampered sales and marketing efforts.

Solution

To tackle this issue, Cisco’s internal focus became one of simplification. They aimed to streamline their portfolio and convey a cohesive "one Cisco" story across multiple products and lines of business.

Northbound partnered with Cisco to assess the brand architecture model and devise a simplified, cohesive naming system across three primary business units: security, networking, and observability. The key to the solution was minimizing sub-brands and embracing descriptive naming over suggestive naming. Northbound also offered one-off naming ideation for discrete products and platforms.