From SurveyMonkey to Momentive: how we shaped what's next (a.k.a. the meta post)

It isn’t every day that you get to launch a new brand — let alone relaunch a 20-year-old tech company. But last week, we did both. SurveyMonkey (SVMK Inc.) is now Momentive (https://momentive.ai), a leader in agile experience management. Our customers are innovators within their industries and our platform delivers fast, high-quality insights that help them shape what’s next. We empower decision-makers to establish programs quickly and make the right calls within hours or days, not weeks or months, because timing is everything in modern experience management. We bring the speed and agility our customers want. 

Before I go further, let me address the elephant (monkey?) in the room and calm the frayed nerves of SurveyMonkey fans everywhere. We know we have a wildly popular brand in SurveyMonkey. We love it too, and we intend to keep that as our surveys product brand. With this change though, we are retooling both our brand architecture and our story to align with our customers’ needs and company priorities. In addition to SurveyMonkey, we offer GetFeedback as our signature product brand in the customer experience category. Our new brand Momentive gives us an opportunity to rename our premium solutions for market research, which operated in the shadows of our self-serve-focused brand, while elevating our overarching enterprise story. 

Reaching this point has been a massive undertaking that we’ve contemplated throughout our acceleration in the enterprise. We knew we wanted to make a bold change — and we also knew that a debut on the world stage would require careful consideration. We conducted deep research using our own brand and market insights solutions, encompassing tens of thousands of respondents, hundreds of potential names, and many, many hours of conversation with key stakeholders. 

Here’s why and how we did it.

Why we decided on a bold change

SurveyMonkey was founded in 1999 and has consistently defined the online surveys category. Our success in surveys allowed us to expand into new areas like customer experience, employee experience, brand insights, and enterprise feedback management. Today we offer so much more than the free survey tool everyone knows and loves. 

In 2018, based on demand from our own customers and the rise of the feedback economy, our focus shifted toward the enterprise. Today, almost 9,000 enterprise customers including Allbirds, Carrefour, IBM, and Intuit rely on our powerful, purpose-built solutions to shape what’s next. We’ve also invested in key partnerships and integrations with other leading enterprise companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, and Zoom. 

With this intensifying focus, we’ve seen great success with even more untapped potential on the horizon. We needed a company name and brand architecture that went beyond our dot-com roots to reflect our near-term priorities and long-term opportunities.

Our extensive research showed that the name SurveyMonkey, while popular and a great fit for our online surveys solution, did not convey our focus on the enterprise. We have extremely high brand awareness built on the back of our highly viral self-serve business, but many don’t realize that we offer powerful, enterprise applications of our AI-powered technology. While our cost-effective self-serve solutions will live on, we aim to have our cake and eat it, too: we’ll retain the intuitiveness of our technology while solving increasingly complex challenges for our enterprise customers.

That was the impetus behind this relaunch. We empower decision-makers to address critical business needs; it was time to make a bold change of our own to elevate our position.  

A new identity at the intersection of people and technology

With so much enterprise momentum and growth potential, we needed a different page on which to tell our expanded story. Momentive is a new type of agile experience management company, built for the breakneck pace of modern business. We put people at the center of our technology, amplifying voices to accelerate progress. Our customers tap into curiosity, get fresh perspectives, and make tough calls with confidence. 

Take a look at our logo. The yellow and blue merge to create a color we’ve named Heritage Green, which is a direct nod to our SurveyMonkey roots. The logo represents where we see our place in the world: right at the intersection of human perspectives, as represented by the curve of the yellow quarter circle, and technology, as represented by the blue up-and-to-the-right triangle. With this new visual identity, we are proud to stand out from the sea of blue logos in the SaaS technology sector, and we aim to bring humanity to a buttoned-up space. 

To reinforce just how central people are to our business, our new corporate website Momentive.ai features real Momentive customers in our hero images. These are the leaders from companies like Jon Estes from LG Electronics, Tamar Beresford from Nasdaq, Tank Mori from Mercari, and Joey CasaDeCalvo from PUMA who are shaping what’s next in the enterprise using Momentive. And if you want someone who exemplifies our vision of raising the bar through amplification of individual voices, look no further than Betsy Scolnik and the team at Women's March Global. We aim to empower every decision-maker in an organization with our solutions, and we can think of no better way to celebrate them than to feature these movers and shakers front and center on our website. 

We landed on the name Momentive after an exhaustive search that reflected our mission of powering the curious so they can shape what’s next. Our search involved almost a thousand potential names that we whittled down to a list of final candidates through extensive qualitative and quantitative research. We tested our final list to understand each name’s pronounceability across regions, characteristics, attributes, associations, and ultimately fit for our category. We love Momentive because of the name’s connection to speed and agility, which is at the heart of why customers choose our solutions. The name evokes the idea of movement and dynamism. We are a company at the forefront of innovation, constantly looking to define what’s next, and now, we have a name that reflects this focus. We chose the .ai domain to showcase the powerful AI and machine learning that underpins all of our solutions, drawing on the 25 million questions answered on our platform every day.

Change happens — whether you embrace it or not 

Given the popularity of SurveyMonkey, it might have been easier to stay the course with our current brand architecture — but we were inspired by brand insights and the perspectives of both customers and employees to reshape this company for its next chapter. Meanwhile - and this is a critical point for employees past, present and future, as well as for customers and partners who enjoy working with our teams - who we are on the inside has not changed. We remain a curious bunch with the same vision and values that made us successful. Our vision has always been to raise the bar for human experiences by amplifying individual voices; now, we have the brand architecture that will help us achieve even greater heights. This relaunch positions us to accelerate our enterprise progress, honoring the curious spirit of SurveyMonkey at our roots while refining our focus and developing Momentive at the forefront. To learn more, visit us at Momentive.ai.

By the way, there's so much more to tell on this story. If you have follow-up questions, feel free to post them in the comments and I'll either answer them here, or in a future post. Thanks for reading!