Motorola officially clarifies brand strategy moving forward

Yesterday’s C-Net interview with Motorola CEO Rick Osterloh surfaced the issue of the Motorola brand being removed from phones moving forward. Today, Motorola has clarified the brand strategy for Motorola moving forward on their official blog.

The blog post, states that the company wanted to “add” a little context that was missing from reports that Motorola and Lenovo, its parents company, wanted to streamline their overall product portfolio and focus on two product sub-brands — Moto and Vibe (known as Le Meng in China). As part of these plans, the “Motorola” company brand will become less central to both companies marketing strategies.

In the post the company says that Motorola Mobility isn’t going anywhere, re-iterating that Motorola took a central role in Lenovo’s smartphone business in August last year, heading up the engineering, design and manufacturing engine for the combined mobile smartphone and wearable technology products.

However, the company does acknowledge that over the last few years, Motorola has made font and colour changes to its logos, products and marketing, recently making the strategic decision to focus on “Moto” as the primary product brand rather than Motorola.

“Moto” is synonymous with Motorola, and it conveys the Motorola brand to consumers in a contemporary and engaging way. That wasn’t the only thing that evolved — the iconic batwing was static blue or red for many years, and we made it fun and colorful. That symbol, which has come to represent the “Moto” brand, continues to play a prominent role, and will remain on our products and in our marketing.

To put it simply, the company will now mainly focus on the “Moto” and “Vibe” brands for all new future products and associated marketing globally. The Motorola name will remain on packaging and elsewhere so as to ensure that the Motorola history and association is never lost, but it won’t be the major focus.

When all is said and done the Lenovo brand will be used in the highly competitive markets globally, with Lenovo in the unique position to offer people a complete PC + tablet + smartphone experience.

How this affects markets like Australia where the Vibe brand is only available through imports, and Motorola themselves appear to have trouble getting their own models to market, remains to be seen. It will be interesting to see how this pans out for Lenovo and Motorola going forward and no doubt we will be watching with a keen eye.