SnapAV, distributor of a multitude of security, A/V, and networking products and the owner of smart home tech maker Control4, announced on Tuesday that it is rebranding as Snap One.
In a briefing with members of the media ahead of the announcement, Kordon Vaughn, VP of Marketing for Snap One, said that given the evolution of the industry and company itself, the name SnapAV just did not fit anymore.
“We’ve been kicking this around, thinking about this for quite a while and we said, ‘ok, what are our priorities? What are our goals?’ All of these things boiled down to these two thoughts: the first is we want our name to reflect who we are and embrace our aspirations for the future,” Vaughn explains.
After considering this, Vaughn says they felt the name ‘Snap One’ best encapsulated who the company is and what they want to accomplish in the marketplace, which is to be the “one” partner that integrators can depend on.
“We first took on the name ‘Snap’ to represent our mission to make our partners’ lives easier. Every interaction an integrator has with us needs to be simple, a ‘snap,’ so that was the purpose of our founding and that remains our purpose today. As we think about our aspirations for the future and boil that down into a simple sentence it is this: it is to be an integrator’s most valued, most trusted partner – the one they keep coming back to again and again because they depend on us because we solve the problems for them.”
Having a name that resonated with integrators beyond the AV market also factored into the rebranding decision, according to Vaughn.
“We’ve had instances where we’ve gone to tradeshows, had conversations with potential new customers and they said, ‘oh, I thought you were an A/V company. You sell all these different things that I can use in my business?’ he says. “Clearly, we’re moving away from that – we’ve been doing it as company for some time – but the name kind of got in the way.”
Vaughn says that the rebrand will have relatively little impact on how integrators interact with the company on a day-to-day basis and that things will remain business as usual from that perspective. Additionally, Vaughn says they plan to continue bringing new products – both those developed in-house and via third parties – to the market and to also increase their number of local retail stores significantly across the country by the end of next year.
Later this year, the company will launch one unified portal so integrators can research, quote, and purchase any products from a single location. Snap One will also have one streamlined loyalty program.
According to Jeff Hindman, Chief Revenue Officer for Snap One, the rebrand is something that has been in the works since the company completed its merger with Control4 in 2019.
“We have recognized to make life simpler for our partners and to make it easier to design, configure, install, and support a site, we’ve got to make one ecosystem that starts with control that includes all of the products around it and just make it easier for an installer to install a system."
Hindman said the company was originally founded by integrators for integrators, and they had a unique understanding of the intricacies of the profession, which really drove their strategy of becoming a better partner for the channel.
“It wasn’t just the products that they brought to market that were part of the Snap value proposition, they were easy to do business with,” Hindman says. “The company invested heavily in its e-commerce platform so that partners could have a better way of doing business with self-service; not only the things they needed to do with the company, but at the time they needed to do it. We invested heavily in the supply chain so that partners could order with confidence knowing that product would arrive on time for the job, and we could ease some of the inventory and warehousing burden to be ready for projects.”
But while the company’s goals have not changed since it was founded, Hindman says the job of the integrator certainly has over the last 15 years with the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the increasing complexity of installs. “As the industry has evolved, we’ve had to evolve pretty significantly to make sure we stay true to our original mission,” he adds.
About the Author:
Joel Griffin is the Editor of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
Joel Griffin | Editor-in-Chief, SecurityInfoWatch.com
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com, a business-to-business news website published by Endeavor Business Media that covers all aspects of the physical security industry. Joel has covered the security industry since May 2008 when he first joined the site as assistant editor. Prior to SecurityInfoWatch, Joel worked as a staff reporter for two years at the Newton Citizen, a daily newspaper located in the suburban Atlanta city of Covington, Ga.
