SAP Branding
SAP is renowned software and programming company, ranked as the 3rd largest company in its field. It was founded in Germany in 1972 by ex IBM engineers. The company is worth $98.4b as at May, 2016 and was rated #27 on Forbes most valuable brands, and #72 for innovative companies.
SAP is a support system for companies, handling their product development under Active Global Support (AGS). The company was initially called Systeme Anwedungen Produkte in der Datenverarbeiting which stands for “Systems, Applications and Products for data processing before it was changed to just SAP.
SAP Is Customer Focused
SAP helps businesses track customer and business interactions. With focus on over 20 industries and 6 industry sectors, namely service industries, discrete services, public services, consumer services and processing industries.
They help small, medium and large businesses by providing a wide range of products for improving company sales, through collaborations and making more effective leads to sales. They hold meetings with customers twice a year where they get to guide them on new products and strategies.
Brand Strategy Of Everybody Wins
Their strength lies in the synergy they create while working together to promote the brand. This way, everybody wins. This is made especially possible of the SAP community network which comprise of customers, partnership, employees, business analysts developers and consultants who are well grounded in technology and analytics.
SAP does well for customer relations with their own customers. They do not relent on helping their customers and they go further to monitor loyal customers and give them rewards. Furthermore, SAP has donated immensely to courses such as Global fund and Red Campaign to name a few. They are also committed to the development of future markets by distribution of free software to businesses in these regions from time to time.
To further demonstrate their commitment to good causes, the brand recently hired employees with autism and Asperger Syndrome- trusting that they can do wonders in the workforce. This is in addition to the myriad of NGOs they support.
Rebranding To Attract Millennials
Seeing the need to have a good representation of Generation Y’s in their company, SAP went all out to revamp their brand image so as to attract more millennials. Matthew Jeffery, VP head of Global sourcing and employment branding said, “We needed to shake up the traditional model of employer branding. We’re competing with companies like Apple, Facebook and Google, so we have to work harder to get our information out”.
This was a revamp revolution that moved the then static online community to become a popular one with over 550,000 users. Why? They understood the power of relevance to an ever evolving world- starting of course, from the redesign of their website being mobile friendly. They also used social media heavily to push out what they referred to as “Life at SAP”. They completely overhauled their existing social media strategy.
Despite controversies and criticisms SAP is relentless in improving and evolving in ways to make the brand more relevant than ever.
