Success Factors - How Not To Position Your Company

If you look at the company called Success Factors, you learn a number of lessons about what not to do when you set up a business. Here are the things that are wrong with the company:

1. Name - The name Success Factors is a generic phrase. In other words, when I say "Success Factors" (proper noun), you hear "success factors." Therefore, I'm forced to append, the words, "the company" before I can mention the company name. Good brand names are normally real-life proper nouns (such as Craig's List or Martha Stewart.) Or they are made up new names such as Microsoft.

2. Tagline - The tagline for the company is "Business Execution Software." This is meaningless. Are they selling ERP? Or CRM? Or BPM? Or is it some HR related software. I can see why they made the choice "Business Execution Software" ... they were probably trying to escalate the importance of their product upto the CEO level and therefore needed an important sounding tag-line. But this has caused them to come up with an unclear, ambiguous sounding tagline.

3. Explanation of Tagline - Even their explanation of the tag-line sounds unintelligible and cliched. Their explanation goes like this: "What is business execution? It's how businesses get things done." I could use that explanation in front of any enterprise software company.

The middling success they've achieved is probably because of good outsider funding, absence of competitors who understand positioning and enormous hard-work from the management team.