How do you stand out in a crowded and distracted digital marketplace? This one question, shared by millions of businesses and entrepreneurs everywhere, drove Network Solutions to challenge its decades-old legacy and undertake its most ambitious transformation ever.
Every business leader has to decide: Do we stay on the course with what’s familiar, or do we evolve to meet the market where it’s headed? For legacy brands, this question carries extra weight, because there’s comfort in a well-established identity, credibility in decades of trust, and real risk in changing what customers already know.
But for many brands and businesses, standing still in a constantly transforming market is its own kind of risk. That’s why we at Network Solutions recently made a bold choice in our most significant rebranding to date.
We spoke with Chief Marketing Officer Joanne Del Toro, and she let us in on Network Solutions’ reinvention story and how it’s designed to help modern businesses navigate the hectic competition online.
Why credible online visibility matters in today’s marketplace
AI-driven search results highlight fewer options while only concentrating attention among a handful of businesses (who can “buy” them through big advertising spends). Trust online has also become harder to earn in an era of internet scams and information overload.
One of the biggest challenges for SMBs is being seen by customers online, simply because:
- Consumer attention is unstable. Buyer preferences and platform engagement models shift rapidly, instantly disrupting existing marketing strategies.
- Technology evolves too fast. Core algorithms and tools accelerate at breakneck speed, creating a big resource and knowledge gap between SMBs and big brands with large budgets.
- Expectations are artificially high. Customers demand instant, personalized experiences driven by industry giants, which SMBs cannot easily afford to replicate.
For Network Solutions, these mounting challenges weren’t just market observations. They were a call to action.
As a brand that spent decades helping businesses establish their online presence, the company recognized a fundamental truth: the foundations of online visibility were shifting beneath the customers’ feet.
Simply offering domain registration and basic web services was no longer enough. Small businesses needed a partner who understood the new rules of digital engagement and could provide tools to compete fairly and effectively against the big guys.
This realization sparked the most significant transformation in the company’s history — one that would challenge nearly five decades of legacy.
Redefining the future by challenging decades of legacy
“Network Solutions has been around for a long time, and it looked like it,” admitted Joanne. However, this rebrand is more than just a cosmetic update; it represents a shift toward putting customers at the center of all future initiatives. While competitors focus on their own technology and platforms, Network Solutions is empowering the small business owner.
“A brand is more than just look and feel,” Joanne explained. “It’s how you deliver to your customers.”
“For new customers and existing customers, both of whom are very important to our enterprise, we want to elevate and amplify their unique online presence,” she added.
That’s when she started asked these questions:
- How do our customers get introduced to the market?
- What do they look like?
- How do they appear?
- What is it that their online presence needs to do to help fuel their business?
- How do we help them break through the noise?
Joanne recalled three ways they identified to do that.
How Network Solutions help customers “break through”
To deliver significant shifts in the market, Joanne identified three pillars any small business can apply:
- Enable your customers to tell their story, their way
- Show your customers you get what really matters to them
- Free your customers up to do more
Enable customers to tell their story their way
Joanne emphasized, “It’s not just a domain or it’s not just a website, but it’s a series of applications that allow customers to really take control of the narrative they want to tell the market.”
This philosophy recognizes that every business has a unique story that shouldn’t be constrained by technical limitations or cookie-cutter templates.
Show customers you get what really matters to them
“I come from a small business family.” Joanne shared her personal experience, “My father ran a service station that was started by my grandfather back in the 1930s and 40s. And for them, it was really about serving their customers.
Keeping their website alive, making sure they had an online presence — those were very important elements of their brand, but it was not the center. We know they needed a partner that worried about making sure that their infrastructure, identity, presence, and that the things that they needed their online presence to do were working for them.
Free your customers up to do more
“Having a provider like us who gets what really matters is really critical,” Joanne explained, “so they didn’t need to worry about whether or not their domain was registered or protected, whether they had a secure solution, that really they were free to do the things they needed to do to serve their customers and not worry about the other stuff.”
Evolution requires finding your voice (not echoing someone else’s)
For Joanne, the biggest challenge during the rebrand was finding authentic differentiation. To truly stand out, she insisted the company move past the narrative of competing against rivals who boast bigger marketing budgets and celebrity spokespeople.
Instead, she was uncompromising that Network Solutions find a voice centered exclusively on its unique commitment: being there for the small business customer.
The key lessons she wants to share from the transformation process include:
- The “Big Tent” principle: Her personal leadership style prioritizes talent over rigid hierarchy. Joanne believes that regardless of department (e.g. whether you’re in tech, marketing, or service), every team member brings a perspective that informs the whole.
- Cross-functional balance: Getting critical elements right, like the new homepage, requires deep collaboration between acquisition, technology, and leadership to effectively balance brand storytelling with conversion goals.
- Strategic voice: Unifying brands wasn’t just an operation to tidy up; it was a strategic move to project one coherent voice across the market.
Practical tips in brand reinvention for SMBs
Rebrands can get complicated, but companies won’t go through the risks unless there’s a good benefit in return.
“You need to really keep it real and focus on the things that matter. This could have been a multi-month extravaganza. And trust me, there were a lot of nooks and crannies,” Joanne recounted.
Here are some tips businesses should consider when undergoing a rebranding:
- Start with strategy, not aesthetics: Define your positioning before touching visual identity. What do you want to stand for? How are you different?
- Find what makes you different: Network Solutions distinguished itself on empathy and support—strengths they’d demonstrated for two decades—rather than chasing celebrity endorsements or technology hype.
- Make customers the center of the story: “Our competitors are all about them. We are all about our small businesses,” Joanne emphasized. This strategic choice influences everything from product development to messaging.
- Back up your brand promise with substance: Network Solutions developed AI-enabled tools in parallel with the rebrand, ensuring they could deliver on the “help you break through” promise immediately.
- Build alignment through collaboration: Bring diverse perspectives to the table early. Establish shared goals and allow teams to tailor the central vision to their areas of responsibility.
- Move with purpose, not perfection: Focus on what matters most and launch with momentum rather than waiting for every detail to be flawless.
Don’t stop improving, because progress as a continuous journey
For Network Solutions, the rebrand demonstrates a commitment to helping entrepreneurs thrive online. But maintaining relevance requires ongoing evolution and a willingness to adapt as the customer needs to change.
Joanne invoked an unexpected metaphor from a Woody Allen movie (Annie Hall) about when change becomes necessary: “I think brands are kind of like sharks. They need to keep moving forward.”
The market that called for this transformation isn’t getting any less demanding. But brands that embrace progress as an ongoing practice become ready with whatever the future holds.
For small business owners facing their own crossroads, Network Solutions’ journey offers both inspiration and instruction. The lesson isn’t just that change is necessary—it’s that change rooted in authentic differentiation, backed by substance, and executed through collaborative alignment creates transformation that resonates with both partners and customers
Progress keeps a legacy strong, and reinvention is how you stay relevant.
The market never stands still. Neither should you.
