Nortek Security & Control on Monday announced that it is rebranding the organization as “Nortek Control” as part of an effort to bring the company’s subsidiaries together under a new, modern name.
According to CEO Christopher Larocca, though security is and will continue to be major part of the company’s focus, they thought it was time that their name reflected all the different markets they serve compared to what brand implied.
“We wanted the new name of the company to be agnostic, if you will, to some of the end-user market because aside from security we’re also in perimeter access, commercial access, health and wellness, home automation, and we have a lot of A/V products as well,” he explains. “They are all important businesses for us and for me, as I talked to our health and wellness customers, it almost seemed odd that they were referring to us as a security business when that’s not the only end-user space we address.”
Larocca, who joined Nortek earlier this year after spending much of his career in the high-tech space, says that while the company was “rich and deep” in technology with brands such as 2GIG, Linear, GoControl, IntelliVision, Elan, and Numera in its portfolio, he thought that its messaging was a bit “dated.”
“I thought the logo looked a little tired and some of the brands probably needed to have a more contemporary look, but the one thing that was certain is that the level of technology and innovation that takes place here I didn’t think was being conveyed in the marketplace,” he explains.
From an internal perspective, Bruce Mungiguerra, Nortek’s Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing, says they have joined some of their sales teams together as a part of the move which should make their lines of communication much simpler.
“The company has been built over the years through several acquisitions and combining of companies… so if you think of it from a sales leadership perspective, pulling some of these brands together and pulling these sales teams together is going to help that communication be a little bit cleaner with our customers,” Mungiguerra adds. “When you think about the various channels we have, we’re controlling, helping in every channel and that control piece makes it so much easier to talk about whether we are controlling a health and wellness device, a garage door or gate operator and so forth.”
Additionally, Larocca does not believe removing “security” from their name will have a detrimental impact on how integrators view the organization since most of them think of Nortek’s individual brands rather than the parent company.
“The relationship that our customers have with the business is really brand-specific,” he says. “Our dealers know us a 2GIG or as Elan or Numera. They don’t really associate too much with the Nortek name, so in a lot of ways this is really a rebranding for employees and maybe some of the bigger companies that deal with multiple brands of ours.”
“If you think about the traditional security dealer that could be impacted by this, they never really refer to the company as Nortek Security & Control and if you think about how things go to market in the channel, it’s through distribution and in every one of those distribution locations, on the shelf, it’s a 2GIG product or a Linear product and they are not thinking about something that is branded as Nortek Security & Control,” Mungiguerra adds.
In a lot ways, Larocca says the rebrand is following the company’s product roadmap because in looking at their product strategies that go out further than a year, many of those are designed to develop into ecosystems that leverage their analytics technology. “I feel like our strategic roadmaps are very innovative, disruptive and technology-focused and we wanted to have the look and feel of the parent reflect that,” he says.
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
