“New” Marketing Cloud Name Changes

The following naming conventions were recently announced during the Salesforce World Tour in Sydney, Australia. A few items worth mentioning before panic ensues is what exactly will not be changing. Pricing, packaging, and how these products are bundled will remain the same along with all product functionalities including features and SKU names.

Messaging/Journeys/ → Marketing Cloud Engagement
Interaction Studio → Marketing Cloud Personalization
Datorama → Marketing Cloud Intelligence
Salesforce CDP → Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform
Advertising Studio → Marketing Cloud Advertising
Pardot → Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

(Image provided by Salesforce)

The renaming of Pardot is the most controversial shock for some marketing users. After a strong 10 years of performance following the acquisition of Pardot in 2012, Salesforce is renaming its email marketing tool to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Why the change you ask? Salesforce is standing strongly behind establishing and maintaining a sense of “easy” across all Marketing Cloud products. Applying language that could be easily understood by various teams and expertise levels is the driving force behind the name change with hopes of quickly conveying what a product does or how it interacts with other products. Now that the semantics are out of the way, finally, the air can be cleared from the debate as to whether Pardot was pronounced with a hard “t” or as a Parisian delicacy or wine region.

Salesforce’s effort in demonstrating this new sense of ease is a result of the various acquisitions over the previous decade and different use cases of Marketing Cloud. Naming products in “layman's terms” will likely benefit everyone involved as not all clients use the tools in the same way. As other thought leaders have shared, the use of Pardot has been utilized mostly for “considered” purchases, and what constitutes a “purchase” varies drastically between business to business and business to consumer. In the nonprofit space, organizations thrive on sharing content through Pardot with their growing audiences of customers and donors whereas a B2B could have intricate campaigns built for a buyer's journey regarding the purchase of an item or service.

No drastic change is ever anticipated to fall on crowds of excitement. Knowing this, Salesforce will only be applying these name changes to their website and in marketing and sales communications for the time being. Later on, in 2022 is when users will begin seeing the name changes in products. This will also include Help and Training assets and external certifications. Another important item to point out is that there will be no immediate change to a user's login access, URL’s or other internal infrastructure items.

Stay in the know and continue to review Salesforce announcements and Release Notes. As for what’s to come in the next release, Salesforce can be quoted as saying, “In our next releases, we’re excited to share the new ways you’ll be able to unify and activate customer data, connect inbound and outbound moments in real-time, engage leads and accounts, and intelligently optimize the customer journey.”