There’s a big move underway, especially among the Indian firms, to rebrand away from outsourcing and BPO. The industry now prefers to use a variety of other terms such as BPM, BPS and managed service. But the immediate impact of changing the terminology on a provider’s website is that the website disappears from the search engines, effectively turning the company into stealth mode and sabotaging marketing efforts when potential customers turn to search engines to look for those services.
In the U.S. market, the term outsourcing is saddled with the negative connotation of job loss and exporting jobs. And in the Indian market, negative connotations have attached themselves to the BPO brand due to BPO workers enjoying themselves in their first job out of college and often getting into interesting escapades that appear to be an aggressive, risky lifestyle. BPO is increasingly seen in a poor light, particularly among the parents of the Indian workforce the providers seek to attract.
India’s service providers have nothing to be embarrassed about; they offer employees high-paying jobs with good career potential. But in an attempt to deal with the negative connotations, they are changing the terms “outsourcing” and “BPO” to sidestep the problematic issues. It’s quite understandable.
There’s no doubt that the industry has accumulated these difficult brand connotations, and we would all prefer not to work in an industry with negative brand connotations. However, businesses tunnel to Google for marketing and, by calling themselves by other terms, they disappear from the search engines.
Nevertheless, customers continue to believe that they’re buying outsourcing and BPO services and are confused and somewhat annoyed about these new terms they must learn. It violates the first rule of marketing, which I’ve blogged about before: it’s all about the customer.
At a time when services growth is becoming more difficult, going into stealth mode in search engines may not be the wisest course of action.
Photo credit: Daniel
