There were two worldwide major media events since my last column that you cannot have failed to have seen. The first was the royal wedding and the second, the death of Osama Bin Laden. Both were fascinating stories for very different reasons and both garnered worldwide media coverage. What was interesting though was the role that social media played in that media coverage.
Over 400m people watched the royal wedding on a dedicated YouTube channel. Not as high as the estimated 2bn television audience but still staggering. During the service, according to Facebook, its users were posting 47 updates a second. As I watched the television coverage, on both channels correspondents pushed their own twitter accounts (I don’t think the BBC or ITV had thought about keeping it to an official profile that they owned rather than a following that moves with the presenter). As Philip Schofield constantly was tweeting live on TV and reading tweets I sat and wondered if Twitter especially had gone mainstream. That was of course until the events of last Sunday night.
The death of Osama Bin Laden by American Special Forces has now been touted as Twitter’s CNN moment. That refers back to the first Gulf war two decades ago when the cable networks 24 hour news coverage brought 24 hours news to mainstream attention and arguably changed the face of news reporting. The story was first unofficially broken by Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual on Twitter) who inadvertently tweeted the whole raid as he lived nearby, commenting on helicopters and explosions and then the now famous “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who live blogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”. It was then done more officially by the former chief of staff for Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary under President George W Bush. "So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn." he wrote at 10.25pm EST Sunday evening. After that it went round the world, within 35 minutes by 11pm EST, Bin Laden news was being tweeted at the rate of 5,106 tweets per second.
It’s this speed of breaking news that is the real change. In 1952 it took 2 days for news of the Lynmouth flood disaster to break. By 1988 the Piper Alpha explosion was reported an hour after it happened. By the time the plane landed on the Hudson River in NY in Jan 2009 it was reported live. However breaking news is not journalism. That is the skill of checking the facts, verifying and adding context and comment. Some commentators have said that news no longer breaks, it now tweets. Certainly the way major news breaks and is first shared may now have changed forever but true insightful, analytical comment on the stories will always come from proper journalism not retweets. I will however leave the last word though to Sohaib Athar who after his now famous tweet followed with: "and here come the mails from mainstream media....sigh".
Tim Youngman is Head of Digital Marketing for Archant follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
Monday, 9 May 2011
Thursday, 7 April 2011
2D barcodes - more than just a funny blob
Some of you may have noticed strange small squares made up of black and white shapes appearing on adverts and posters and even shop windows. This is not some new form of graffiti but in fact they are 2D barcodes. If you have not noticed them before you soon will do as worldwide usage of them has quadrupled over the last year and now even mainstream brands like Waitrose are using them, but more on that later.
A 2D barcode works in the same way as the barcode on the back of a tin of beans i.e. you scan it. However instead of having to drag a supermarket till around with you, these are created to be scanned by mobile phones and hence their use has exploded with the growth in smart phones.
The name “2D barcode” is a generic term used to describe these mobile tags and you may have heard of them being used by some of the branded versions such as QR Codes or EZ Code. But they are all the same thing. A user downloads a 2D barcode reader to their smart phone, of which there are many freely available, and then they can scan 2D barcodes wherever they see them. The barcode effectively acts as a graphic link to a website or webpage which the phone then displays which could contain anything the brand owner wants so long as it’s been optimised for mobile display.
Good examples of how brands have used them include the aforementioned Waitrose Christmas campaign featuring Saint Delia and Heston Blumenthal. Here 2D barcodes were added to the print ads of the campaign which linked users straight to the Waitrose mobile site and the recipes being featured in the ads. Eurosport added a 2D barcode to its print advertising for its coverage of the Australian Open which linked to its mobile live scoring service.
There are issues with this new technology currently though. It’s so new most early adopters have found that unless they are targeting tech savvy mobile users, they need to add some form of caption underneath the code explaining how to get a reader and the process of scanning the code. The link must also direct users to a mobile optimised web offering, another common mistake.
However this new technology gives brands so many different ways to use it. They can be used in print advertising as a novel way of driving people to your content. You can add them to business cards and marketing material to drive people to further information about your company or products. They could be added to vouchers or posters in your stores and my favourite idea is having them printed onto branded t-shirts.
Creating a 2D code is very easy and there are lots of free sites that do it for you, just Google “2D barcode generator”. These are here to stay and early adopters will get the best stand out and your usage is only limited by your imagination.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
A 2D barcode works in the same way as the barcode on the back of a tin of beans i.e. you scan it. However instead of having to drag a supermarket till around with you, these are created to be scanned by mobile phones and hence their use has exploded with the growth in smart phones.
The name “2D barcode” is a generic term used to describe these mobile tags and you may have heard of them being used by some of the branded versions such as QR Codes or EZ Code. But they are all the same thing. A user downloads a 2D barcode reader to their smart phone, of which there are many freely available, and then they can scan 2D barcodes wherever they see them. The barcode effectively acts as a graphic link to a website or webpage which the phone then displays which could contain anything the brand owner wants so long as it’s been optimised for mobile display.
Good examples of how brands have used them include the aforementioned Waitrose Christmas campaign featuring Saint Delia and Heston Blumenthal. Here 2D barcodes were added to the print ads of the campaign which linked users straight to the Waitrose mobile site and the recipes being featured in the ads. Eurosport added a 2D barcode to its print advertising for its coverage of the Australian Open which linked to its mobile live scoring service.
There are issues with this new technology currently though. It’s so new most early adopters have found that unless they are targeting tech savvy mobile users, they need to add some form of caption underneath the code explaining how to get a reader and the process of scanning the code. The link must also direct users to a mobile optimised web offering, another common mistake.
However this new technology gives brands so many different ways to use it. They can be used in print advertising as a novel way of driving people to your content. You can add them to business cards and marketing material to drive people to further information about your company or products. They could be added to vouchers or posters in your stores and my favourite idea is having them printed onto branded t-shirts.
Creating a 2D code is very easy and there are lots of free sites that do it for you, just Google “2D barcode generator”. These are here to stay and early adopters will get the best stand out and your usage is only limited by your imagination.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Boom or Bust - Dotcom Valuations Soaring Again
For my sins I have been working in and around the web since before the days of boo.com and Lastminute started. I once worked for an Internet Service Provider, long since swallowed up and re-branded, and got excited about valuations of the business based on the numbers of subscribers. I honestly thought that my share option at the time would allow me to retire before I was 30. Of course now I know I will be working until I am 70. It never occurred to many of us that the real value of the business is not how many people use it but how much profit it generates. A couple of years later and the dot com crash happened and valuations crashed, and investments from individuals who should have known better stopped.
A lot has changed since then but valuations of pure-play internet companies have started to rise again. You might think that the Google bid for Groupon, the daily deal website, of $6bn was an incredible figure. However Groupon made a reported $760m in revenue in 2010 which put that number into perspective. Rightmove the property site has recently been valued at £1bn helped by the fact that it made pre-tax profits of £52.2m last year from selling listing on its site to estate agents. Against those numbers you can see where the valuations come from.
However there are other examples which don’t make sense. The online music service Spotify has just managed to get $100m funding to try to compete with Apple’s iTunes service. That funding means that the business is valued at $1bn despite the fact that it is currently loss making. Compare that to HMV the high street and now also online music store, whose market capitalisation is currently $150m or about a seventh of the loss making online only Spotify.
Also last month AOL bought the American news website the Huffington Post for $315m. That is almost the same price as the current valuation for Trinity Mirror. That has 5 national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, 160 regional newspapers and over 500 websites let alone 6,500 staff. Trinity is not helped by its borrowings of £260m and a pension fund deficit of £161m. By the way that means that Rightmove and its one site is worth 6 times Trinity Mirror according to the City.
As you can tell by the number of $ signs in the column most of these valuations are being driven by American companies. However there now definitely seems to be a trend of upwards valuations of internet companies. This time around however on the whole the lessons from the last bust have been learnt and they are mainly being valued on the cold hard reality of how much cash is being generated by the business. History teaches much and I hope that those who are now responsible for valuing who then were probably at high school look back at the last boom. That may keep the lesson to Boo who rather than Boo hoo.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
A lot has changed since then but valuations of pure-play internet companies have started to rise again. You might think that the Google bid for Groupon, the daily deal website, of $6bn was an incredible figure. However Groupon made a reported $760m in revenue in 2010 which put that number into perspective. Rightmove the property site has recently been valued at £1bn helped by the fact that it made pre-tax profits of £52.2m last year from selling listing on its site to estate agents. Against those numbers you can see where the valuations come from.
However there are other examples which don’t make sense. The online music service Spotify has just managed to get $100m funding to try to compete with Apple’s iTunes service. That funding means that the business is valued at $1bn despite the fact that it is currently loss making. Compare that to HMV the high street and now also online music store, whose market capitalisation is currently $150m or about a seventh of the loss making online only Spotify.
Also last month AOL bought the American news website the Huffington Post for $315m. That is almost the same price as the current valuation for Trinity Mirror. That has 5 national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, 160 regional newspapers and over 500 websites let alone 6,500 staff. Trinity is not helped by its borrowings of £260m and a pension fund deficit of £161m. By the way that means that Rightmove and its one site is worth 6 times Trinity Mirror according to the City.
As you can tell by the number of $ signs in the column most of these valuations are being driven by American companies. However there now definitely seems to be a trend of upwards valuations of internet companies. This time around however on the whole the lessons from the last bust have been learnt and they are mainly being valued on the cold hard reality of how much cash is being generated by the business. History teaches much and I hope that those who are now responsible for valuing who then were probably at high school look back at the last boom. That may keep the lesson to Boo who rather than Boo hoo.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
Should brands provoke emotion and why desire is the strongest
One of my lecturers at university, way way back, was one of the team responsible for the infamous Club 18-30’s marketing campaigns. He spent many hours drilling into his students that true brands must evoke some form of emotion in people. If there is no emotion it is just a product, emotions makes people choose a brand even if other products may fulfil a users needs better.
When questioned on his philosophy regarding to a brand evoking a hate reaction his response was that there is a fine line between love and hate. It is the challenge of the marketing professional to understand that fine line and to move users from one side of the coin to the other. Doing it in the real world is a different thing but he was of course right.
He did miss one emotion that arguably is stronger than both love and hate. You may love Heinz and you might hate marmite but if you desire something you often are prepared to pay a premium to have your desire satisfied.
A new study from band consultancy Clear compiled a league table of desirable brands after asking 4,000 consumers their views on a list of 300 brands. Some brands in the list such as Oxo at 47 would be a surprise but the top three of iPhone, Rolls Royce and iPod are probably not. Interestingly only eight of the top twenty are what would be described as luxury goods and three quarters of the top 100 are not either, including such “desirable” brands as Dettol and Domestos.
Surveys are of course just a view of a subset of public opinion and clearly not everyone can manage or create a sense of desire into their brands. However from the obvious in the top twenty including Aston Martin, Prada and Rolex the inclusion of Cadbury at number four might surprise you.
Cadbury has managed to both appeal to hearts and minds and have a clear understanding of how its brands fit into peoples lives. For example, the recent Gorilla playing the drums TV ad for Dairy Milk did actually have a point. It was not the result of a long afternoon in the pub coming up with creatives. It was created to remind people of the enjoyment of eating chocolate visually shown by the enjoyment of the gorilla beating the drums. I didn’t get that either by the way. They do though spend time trying to understand how people lead their lives and then how their product could fit into this. For example whether people prefer eating bars of chocolate or from more convenient bags.
Not every brand will be desirable, nor would it be right for many brands to try to achieve this emotional reaction as it might not actually be right for the product or service. For those that have potential though the rewards of achieving this desirable state are clear.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
When questioned on his philosophy regarding to a brand evoking a hate reaction his response was that there is a fine line between love and hate. It is the challenge of the marketing professional to understand that fine line and to move users from one side of the coin to the other. Doing it in the real world is a different thing but he was of course right.
He did miss one emotion that arguably is stronger than both love and hate. You may love Heinz and you might hate marmite but if you desire something you often are prepared to pay a premium to have your desire satisfied.
A new study from band consultancy Clear compiled a league table of desirable brands after asking 4,000 consumers their views on a list of 300 brands. Some brands in the list such as Oxo at 47 would be a surprise but the top three of iPhone, Rolls Royce and iPod are probably not. Interestingly only eight of the top twenty are what would be described as luxury goods and three quarters of the top 100 are not either, including such “desirable” brands as Dettol and Domestos.
Surveys are of course just a view of a subset of public opinion and clearly not everyone can manage or create a sense of desire into their brands. However from the obvious in the top twenty including Aston Martin, Prada and Rolex the inclusion of Cadbury at number four might surprise you.
Cadbury has managed to both appeal to hearts and minds and have a clear understanding of how its brands fit into peoples lives. For example, the recent Gorilla playing the drums TV ad for Dairy Milk did actually have a point. It was not the result of a long afternoon in the pub coming up with creatives. It was created to remind people of the enjoyment of eating chocolate visually shown by the enjoyment of the gorilla beating the drums. I didn’t get that either by the way. They do though spend time trying to understand how people lead their lives and then how their product could fit into this. For example whether people prefer eating bars of chocolate or from more convenient bags.
Not every brand will be desirable, nor would it be right for many brands to try to achieve this emotional reaction as it might not actually be right for the product or service. For those that have potential though the rewards of achieving this desirable state are clear.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Happy New Year - Advertising Predictions for 2011
This New Year, branded “the year of austerity”, will no doubt be hard for many but will also come with highlights for others. You might think that the world of advertising will be hit from reducing budgets and a general belt tightening. However many major brand owners have spoken on record that they will be spending similar amounts, and more in most cases, to last year but spread over a greater number of channels and initiatives. Three areas to look out for in 2011 will be local coupons, product placement on television and location based advertising on mobiles.
Local coupons and vouchers have become massive in the US over the last year with Google even trying to buy the US company Groupon for $6bn. These will become a new vehicle for local companies to create new business and innovative local companies like tickles.co.uk are already offering daily deals to thousands of registered users across Norfolk and Suffolk.
Product placement on television, which I have lost count of the number of times I have written about, finally starts in the UK at the end of next month. Placement is nothing new in the states and with our channels filled with US imports, viewers are already well used to the sight of bottles of Coca Cola and Pepsi looming large. By the end of this year you can expect this to change. While you may not see pints of Fosters across the bar at the Rovers Return, you will start to see placements of other kinds in programs on commercial channels as they try to claw back recently lost revenues.
By this summer mobile operator Orange has announced it is launching location based ads with O2 expecting a roll out by the third quarter of 2011. What this means is that if your phone works on those networks you can opt in to receive ads sent to you based on where you are. So you could be walking down your local high street past a Starbucks and you would be sent an offer such as 50p off a cup of coffee to tempt you into the store to purchase. This may sound intrusive but the key point is that these will be opt in ads i.e. you have to sign up to the service to get them.
Despite all these new and wonderful ways of being inundated with adverts there is no guarantee that the adverts themselves will be any good. So I would like to leave you this month with the results of a recent poll in Marketing Magazine of the most irritating ads of last year. In top position was that affront to music the Gocompare series of ads with that opera singer. The number two slot was taken by the frankly terrible webuyanycar and number 3 was injurylayers4u . All definitely irritating ads, but through people remembering them they have all done their job. If you have any other candidates send them to me via twitter @timyoungman. Happy New Year readers!
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
Local coupons and vouchers have become massive in the US over the last year with Google even trying to buy the US company Groupon for $6bn. These will become a new vehicle for local companies to create new business and innovative local companies like tickles.co.uk are already offering daily deals to thousands of registered users across Norfolk and Suffolk.
Product placement on television, which I have lost count of the number of times I have written about, finally starts in the UK at the end of next month. Placement is nothing new in the states and with our channels filled with US imports, viewers are already well used to the sight of bottles of Coca Cola and Pepsi looming large. By the end of this year you can expect this to change. While you may not see pints of Fosters across the bar at the Rovers Return, you will start to see placements of other kinds in programs on commercial channels as they try to claw back recently lost revenues.
By this summer mobile operator Orange has announced it is launching location based ads with O2 expecting a roll out by the third quarter of 2011. What this means is that if your phone works on those networks you can opt in to receive ads sent to you based on where you are. So you could be walking down your local high street past a Starbucks and you would be sent an offer such as 50p off a cup of coffee to tempt you into the store to purchase. This may sound intrusive but the key point is that these will be opt in ads i.e. you have to sign up to the service to get them.
Despite all these new and wonderful ways of being inundated with adverts there is no guarantee that the adverts themselves will be any good. So I would like to leave you this month with the results of a recent poll in Marketing Magazine of the most irritating ads of last year. In top position was that affront to music the Gocompare series of ads with that opera singer. The number two slot was taken by the frankly terrible webuyanycar and number 3 was injurylayers4u . All definitely irritating ads, but through people remembering them they have all done their job. If you have any other candidates send them to me via twitter @timyoungman. Happy New Year readers!
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
Monday, 6 December 2010
To review or not to review that is the question
There are many ways to tell when an issue or topic has gone mainstream. You could look at press clippings or even Google it and see the number pages. If it’s very current you could even just see how many people are discussing it on Twitter. However I have created a new monitoring tool which I like to call “the one show test”. The One Show, long lost child of Nationwide and the Blue Peter for adults is now famed for the varying topics it covers. So when something is picked up by them you know it has reached a critical mass. So it was with the debate about the pros and cons of customer review sites.
The piece in question was regarding the rights and wrongs of the tourism review site Tripadvisor. Over 40m people a month log on the site to read what others have said about hotels and activities to do when on holiday. The coverage on the One Show stemmed from the class action that Tripadvisor is facing in the US from some US hoteliers who claim that negative reviews are defamatory. As the reviews can be anonymous, the hoteliers say there is no way of verifying that the reviews are genuine and from people who have really experienced their hotel or service. I was recently a judge for the recent EDP Tourism Awards in the online category and at the awards night last Friday I asked some of those present their views both on TripAdvisor and reviews in general. Most were positive but also voiced the ease of potential abuse.
As the web becomes more social focussed and less a big data warehouse,e so this move to reviews will continue. Ten years ago most of what was said about a business was probably put there by the business themselves, now, most has come from others. Research firm Forrester recently published a European survey that showed that 54% of respondents stated that what others say about a brand directly affects their shopping basket.
Argos took the brave step of allowing open reviews against all its product lines online a few years ago. This is a business that last year posted sales from its website of £1.4billion and that is set for another step change this year. Not all the reviews are positive but overall they view their openness as only a positive for the perception of Argos and helps enforce buying decisions on positive products and stock decisions on poor reviewed one.
Locally, Naked Wines, the Norfolk based online wine retailer, also uses reviews as a key part of its offerings. My last purchase from them was driven from an email offering a discount on wines in return for reviews, and reviews and customer ratings are an integral part of the Naked Wines online offering.
As I have said in previous columns this trend will only continue so the choice is to exploit it to your benefit or ignore and potentially miss out to others who don’t.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
The piece in question was regarding the rights and wrongs of the tourism review site Tripadvisor. Over 40m people a month log on the site to read what others have said about hotels and activities to do when on holiday. The coverage on the One Show stemmed from the class action that Tripadvisor is facing in the US from some US hoteliers who claim that negative reviews are defamatory. As the reviews can be anonymous, the hoteliers say there is no way of verifying that the reviews are genuine and from people who have really experienced their hotel or service. I was recently a judge for the recent EDP Tourism Awards in the online category and at the awards night last Friday I asked some of those present their views both on TripAdvisor and reviews in general. Most were positive but also voiced the ease of potential abuse.
As the web becomes more social focussed and less a big data warehouse,e so this move to reviews will continue. Ten years ago most of what was said about a business was probably put there by the business themselves, now, most has come from others. Research firm Forrester recently published a European survey that showed that 54% of respondents stated that what others say about a brand directly affects their shopping basket.
Argos took the brave step of allowing open reviews against all its product lines online a few years ago. This is a business that last year posted sales from its website of £1.4billion and that is set for another step change this year. Not all the reviews are positive but overall they view their openness as only a positive for the perception of Argos and helps enforce buying decisions on positive products and stock decisions on poor reviewed one.
Locally, Naked Wines, the Norfolk based online wine retailer, also uses reviews as a key part of its offerings. My last purchase from them was driven from an email offering a discount on wines in return for reviews, and reviews and customer ratings are an integral part of the Naked Wines online offering.
As I have said in previous columns this trend will only continue so the choice is to exploit it to your benefit or ignore and potentially miss out to others who don’t.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Gap and its logo 360 turnaround
This month saw one of the more embarrassing about turns in the last year and I am not talking about RooneyGate. No this comes from that well know purveyor of clothing Gap. Gap actually started in 1969 in San Francisco and since then has grown to its current position of owning 5 leading store brands including Banana Republic and Old Navy and now turns over $14bn a year.
Gap, as you may or may not know, is also quite famous for using its own name and logo splashed over its clothing. Of course many clothing brands do that but Gap has always been known to do it in a very American way and sometime in your life you have probably seen someone wearing a sweatshirt with GAP in large letters on the front.
Its name and indeed its logo, with Gap in white text sitting in a blue box, is one of the more recognisable logos in the world. So much so that I was surprised to see that it was considering changing it. I was even more amused during the following 7 days of extreme embarrassment for the Gap board.
On October 6th Gap announced it was changing its logo, removing the blue box and changing the font. Within hours the new logo was universally panned with some descriptions not right for this family newspaper. The kinder ones related it to something created in 5mins in Powerpoint or that it was more geared towards a new piece of accounting software, ouch!
Social media sites were flooded with comments, virtually all negative. Within 3 days Gap’s senior management announced that the new logo was being retracted and that they had decided to start a “crowdsurfing project” to come up with better ideas. Now I had never heard of that one either and presumed that they came up with it while in a more lenient coffee house considering the current debate in California to legalise marijuana.
Most commentators renamed its “crowdsufing project” to what it actually was, an embarrassing u-turn. However that’s not where it ended, on October 12th just 6 days after it started and 3 after the announcement of its first change of policy, the president of Gap North America announced that it was withdrawing its “crowdsurfing” strategy and returning to its original logo.
This spectacular 360 degree turn of policy quite rightly attracted large amounts of media attention. Interestingly many commentators concluded that this was all an extremely clever piece of press manipulation designed to create large brand awareness. They simply could not believe that a company as large as Gap could make such an almighty hash of such a big thing. I could almost buy that argument if they had just stopped at the “crowdsourcing” point and ended up shortlisting some of the thousands of received logo suggestions for a worldwide integrated campaign using a social media driven vote on a new logo. But they didn’t, they turned face again and went back to the old saying they had “learned a lot in this process”.
In my opinion this was a simple case of a very public mistake that they took too long to correct. Logos are an emotive subject and often overplayed. Take Tesco, its logo has been subtly tweaked over time, but it’s pretty much the same as it has been since I had hair and it hasn’t stopped it taking over the world. Changing your logo will not turn your business round. Understanding your customer needs and delivering products solutions to them will. I hope in Gap’s case the management has learnt its lesson.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
Gap, as you may or may not know, is also quite famous for using its own name and logo splashed over its clothing. Of course many clothing brands do that but Gap has always been known to do it in a very American way and sometime in your life you have probably seen someone wearing a sweatshirt with GAP in large letters on the front.
Its name and indeed its logo, with Gap in white text sitting in a blue box, is one of the more recognisable logos in the world. So much so that I was surprised to see that it was considering changing it. I was even more amused during the following 7 days of extreme embarrassment for the Gap board.
On October 6th Gap announced it was changing its logo, removing the blue box and changing the font. Within hours the new logo was universally panned with some descriptions not right for this family newspaper. The kinder ones related it to something created in 5mins in Powerpoint or that it was more geared towards a new piece of accounting software, ouch!
Social media sites were flooded with comments, virtually all negative. Within 3 days Gap’s senior management announced that the new logo was being retracted and that they had decided to start a “crowdsurfing project” to come up with better ideas. Now I had never heard of that one either and presumed that they came up with it while in a more lenient coffee house considering the current debate in California to legalise marijuana.
Most commentators renamed its “crowdsufing project” to what it actually was, an embarrassing u-turn. However that’s not where it ended, on October 12th just 6 days after it started and 3 after the announcement of its first change of policy, the president of Gap North America announced that it was withdrawing its “crowdsurfing” strategy and returning to its original logo.
This spectacular 360 degree turn of policy quite rightly attracted large amounts of media attention. Interestingly many commentators concluded that this was all an extremely clever piece of press manipulation designed to create large brand awareness. They simply could not believe that a company as large as Gap could make such an almighty hash of such a big thing. I could almost buy that argument if they had just stopped at the “crowdsourcing” point and ended up shortlisting some of the thousands of received logo suggestions for a worldwide integrated campaign using a social media driven vote on a new logo. But they didn’t, they turned face again and went back to the old saying they had “learned a lot in this process”.
In my opinion this was a simple case of a very public mistake that they took too long to correct. Logos are an emotive subject and often overplayed. Take Tesco, its logo has been subtly tweaked over time, but it’s pretty much the same as it has been since I had hair and it hasn’t stopped it taking over the world. Changing your logo will not turn your business round. Understanding your customer needs and delivering products solutions to them will. I hope in Gap’s case the management has learnt its lesson.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman
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