Posts Tagged ‘new logo’

Today’s post in HubSpot’s blog which includes suggestions on naming a product or company is spot on. Read it and you can learn volumes about naming your new product or business and perhaps prevent many headaches.

Particularly important is the admonition to “keep the size of your naming team small.” As a veteran of many naming (brainstorming) sessions, you want to be sure to keep focused and HubSpot is correct, too many cooks do spoil the soup. Branding by committee doesn’t work.

The other point that is important and bears further thought is, “What are the most important ideas you want to get across to your target market?” Jeff Taylor of Cognetix Advertising and Marketing and I were talking about this just the other day. We were talking about it in the context of the many websites that allow new business owners to get a logo for a flat fee from a web-based service. Jeff’s point is that many of these services and sites will create an interesting logo, but bottom line, does that logo deliver the message of who and what your business is and who it serves? Does the consumer recognize their needs and wants in it? Does the logo fit the brand that you are trying to create? Our concern is that as graphic design becomes more of a commodity, there is less focus on message.

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Pepsi’s unveiled their new logo/look and is using social media to get the ball rolling. I invited my 22 year old son to weigh in on what and how Pepsi is doing this and here are his thoughts. Very insightful and on target.

If I were managing the roll out, I would not have blatantly announced I was “using social networking” to a bunch of Ad Bloggers. I would have used guerrilla marketing/micro advertising that treated the new logo as an obliteration of the old logo. In a year when “Change” is used as a slogan so much in politics, it is devastatingly clear how only one politician (Obama) has been able to actually appropriate it and manage it properly. He didn’t tell people they were going to start a social networking of barackobama.com, they just introduced and did it.

Furthermore, the Obama logo was perfect for destroying the stupid flag-and-name paradigm of political advertising. Shephard Farey’s propaganda posters (which I find very disturbing) also were daring enough to transform the campaign into a movement.

That’s what Pepsi should have done. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” except you are slowly infiltrating and upgrading your own brand. That’s what the Internet means today. It gives people the power to erode institutions through a multitude of voices– that’s how the Netroots beat the Clintons. In a wargame the US staged to prepare for a naval battle with Iran, a commander representing Iran chose to load all of Iran’s commercial, private, and military boats with dynamite and swarm the slow American dreadnaughts. He annihilated the US Navy in the simulation, so the Pentagon reset the war game and told him he couldn’t do that. That’s the power of small things versus large institutions.

Advertisers need to realize that social networking isn’t television. I don’t think they have. They still use it like a message-disseminating tool, not a message-shaping one. It’s not a megaphone. This generation distributes its own news, cuts up techno songs and puts rap lyrics over them, and designs its own t-shirts. User-generated content is the norm. I buy stuff, but I’m even more inclined to buy it if I think it was my idea.

And another thing kids hate: when big companies try to look cool by doing what the kids do, and making it obvious they are doing what the kids do. Like this campaign.

I do see that they are “inviting people to participate,” but coming from a corporation, that just sounds hollow. Especially because they already did a re-design and are stating this is “part of the new direction.”

So Pepsi should have made it appear like something new and better was taking over the brand instead of just saying, “This is what the new logo is now, look, it’s so effing cool because it’s not like those old logos it’s new and looks like an iPod and you guys like iPods, right? Because it looks like one and we’re using social networking to roll it out and you guys like that too, right?” See, Coke does redesigns, but I think it’s more comfortable with its status as “Classic.” This seems like the effort to get Generation After NeXt. Generation NeXt was a great campaign for the late 90s, by the way.

So what would the campaign look like? Probably the new logo everywhere, on subways, billboards, next to the old logo in stores, culminating with a You Tube of a solar eclipse. Then the blacked out sun becomes the new logo. Who knows if that would work. But I do think they missed the nuance of social networking and its importance to this generation.