What’s in a Name? “Coupons.com” Becomes “Quotient”

Looking for a deal on an Altria product? Why not Alphabet it and see if there are any Quotient printables available?

That may sound like a bunch of gobbledygook, but it’s really just a bit of corporate speak, as Coupons.com prepares to officially change its name to Quotient Technology, Inc.

Now before you go changing your internet bookmarks, trying to remember a new web address or wondering what in the world “Quotient” has to do with coupons, don’t panic. Coupons.com the website isn’t going away. But Coupons.com the company is, so to speak.

The company announced a name change on Tuesday that it said was “a long time coming.” The new name, Quotient, is “designed to better reflect the breadth and sophistication of the company’s business offerings,” the company explained. “In some ways, the Coupons.com name overshadows the great products and services we provide to brands and retailers,” CEO Steven Boal said in a statement.

Since going public about a year and a half ago, Coupons.com has regaled investors with talk of its Retailer iQ platform, which a number of retailers now use to provide personalized offers, digital circulars, electronic receipts and more. So investors might be forgiven for forgetting that Coupons.com also happens to offer coupons.

So the corporate name change is meant to distinguish between the coupon platform – which isn’t going anywhere, and will remain Coupons.com – and the company itself, which wants to be known for much more than just coupons. The name change, Boal said, will allow the company to continue “developing new solutions that advance the promotions, media and precision marketing industries” – beyond coupons.

Within the month, Coupons.com’s corporate branding and stock symbol will change, but printable coupon fans may never notice anything different. In that sense, the change is somewhat similar to what Google just went through in renaming its corporate brand “Alphabet”, a move designed to reflect the company’s diversification beyond its eponymous search engine. And, to use an earlier example, everyone knows the name Philip Morris, but the tobacco brand’s parent company renamed itself Altria a dozen years ago to reflect its broader business interests (and to resolve the pesky PR problem of being named for a tobacco company).

In Coupons.com’s case, the name change could also be a hedge against the day when printable coupons – the company’s flagship product, since 1998 – just aren’t around anymore. “Over time, we’d love to see consumers go completely paperless,” Boal told investors earlier this year. And with things like personalized offers, dynamic pricing and online grocery shopping in our future, the idea of clipping anything out at all before you go shopping may someday become antiquated. And what company wants its own name to be an anachronism? (Just look what happened to RadioShack).

If you go way back with printable coupons, you may remember when E-centives.com morphed into CouponNetwork.com (and then went away altogether), or when Valassis’s Save.com went away, was reborn as RedPlum.com, briefly went back to Save.com, and then back to RedPlum again. Coupons.com hopes to avoid that kind of brand confusion, by retaining the Coupons.com name and web address for its printable coupons, despite the corporate name change.

So you can keep on visiting Coupons.com for printable coupons, no matter what the name of the parent company is. And if you see any references on the site to Quotient in the near future, at least now you know what it refers to. And if you ever forget? Well, just Alphabet – er, Google it.