I’ll cut to the punch line:  Partners and customers don’t much care what your brand or designation is, it’s what you do with it. 

How do I know this?  

• First, I was on the spending-end of a quarter-million dollar branding exercise at Microsoft in 2001
• Second, we (EMM) have been conducting a series of Microsoft partner research lately (about 300 partners in the past few weeks) and we’ve received a lot of unsolicited input from partners around their branding concerns.

Based on the above information I’d say these three trade-offs need to be considered:  

1.  Bandwidth vs. transition:  One thing that’s often overlooked is the time, money and effort it takes to move from your current brand to the new one.   I recall years after the introduction of the Microsoft Certified Partner brand, I still ran across web sites where partners were using the old “Microsoft Solution Provider” designation. 

Old logo, 1997

Remember, you’ll be asking your partners to re-brand themselves and make an investment by replacing their signage, collateral, window clings, proposal templates, letterhead, folders, fax headers and business cards. Most partners spend $10,000 a year on ALL of their marketing and have no full-time marketing staff. Your tradeoff question is this: Do you want your partners focused on shuffling their brand around or selling your solutions?

New logo, 2001

Personally, I’d rather a partner spend $1,000 on hosting a customer event than paying a designer to change the logo on all of their collateral.  That’s the real trade-off that’s happening out there with partners.  The flock of birds you envision rapidly changing course right along with you and your brand (du jour) is a fallacy.   

2. Building awareness vs. inherent awareness:  Whether you tier your program branding Smurf, SuperSmurf and UltraSmurf what really matters is how you promote the designation with customers.  Several vendor programs try to get fancy and offer “Expert, Elite, Alliance, Premium, etc” (try translating that into Russian) but, when we completed our mega-spendy branding research we landed on Gold as the top tier designation. Thanks to our Greek friends, the Olympics have long established three familiar metals as a system that is now inherently understood as good/better/best.  On top of that, it translated meaningfully worldwide. 
Consider this:  Government RFPs often designate a Gold Certified Partner as a requirement to respond to the bid.  How long do you suppose it will take to educate the US Government on the new designations and which ones they should/shouldn’t include in their RFP?

Make no mistake, it takes years and millions of dollars to make a meaningful brand as any realistic marketer would tell you.  Most partner programs aren’t funded like a product group who could pull off a brand introduction campaign.   

Your trade-off question is this:  Do I have the investment to introduce a new brand or does my brand need to have some inherent meaning that customers will be able to figure out even if they weren’t exposed to a brand campaign? 

3.  Detail vs. interest:   Yes, customers do need to know in what area the partner has expertise.  But not necessarily right up front in the brand.  Microsoft and other vendors are packing a lot of additional information into a brand and in doing so, become less and less interesting.   The details should be unfolded or you risk losing the impact of the overall brand -- consider how a partner with multiple designations is supposed to represent themselves on a business card. 

Imagine that you have a partner using the designation on their web site.  Ideally, the customer should be able to click on the brand and learn more about what area the partner has earned their designation in and what that brand means by having the logo link to the vendor web site that explains the designation.  You just don’t need to include all of that detail within the overall designation. 

Let’s take an offline scenario:  Customers might learn from a business letter that the partner has a designation.  The partner then should have ready-made copy that they can use explaining their area of expertise and might include a report or letter from the vendor that proclaims and validates the details of their designation.  I’d suggest you designate the word “Specialist” as the only word that is used in the brand itself.  It will invite the question: “Specialist in what?” Then create ways to unfold that information out using supplemental information available in the context of the brand (web site, confirmation letters and pre-made copy). 

Don’t tell the whole story inside of one brand.  This was something that I had to learn and I thank the CMG team who had the discipline to apply it and school me. 

Your trade-off question here is:  Do you want to manage hundreds of iterations of brands to include specific detail or do you want to have the brand “Specialist” draw sufficient customer interest to seek out more information about the brand? 

A specific call-out to Microsoft who is revamping their branding:  I think after you go down this path of transitioning the brand, you might find:

a) Partners will be resistant to change because they don’t see the value in investing to swap out the brand (again). 
b) You’ve over-engineered the competency designations so that you’ll be in a constant tangle of how to organize and orient those designations over time.
c) The only thing that matters is how much you invest in promoting the designation.  So, imagine the possibility if you re-assign the re-branding budget and invest it in brand AWARENESS-BUILDING of the current brand system.  It’s not too late to turn back! 

In closing, here are a few unsolicited partner quotes from the past few weeks of interviews: 

“The most valuable benefit is the designation - it’s being able to say that we are “certified”. We’re more reputable to perspective customers.”

"[I joined because] we wanted to obtain Gold level, for the badge of honor.  "
 
"[We joined for] the status of having label with MS – gold partner status."