Fresh Impressions on Brandmarks (from my 5-year-old)

I think it’s really interesting that his daughter hits not only on the brands that she (presumably) has direct experience with (e.g., Disney and Pepsi, which she refers to as the ‘pop from the pizza place’), but also products that she isn’t a direct consumer of (e.g., Starbucks and BP). It really is impressive that more often than not she either knows the brand name or the category it falls in. It seems to me that the ones that really stick in her mind the most are the simplest, which goes along with what I’ve always believed—simpler is often better. On some of the more complex logos (Boeing, for example), she doesn’t really know what it’s for (I’ll admit that I didn’t know what it was, either), but she just kind of says what she thinks it is.

I appreciated that when she sees the McDonald’s logo, she knows what it is right away, but she also adds something in that I never considered. She says that McDonald’s ‘M’ looks like it’s made up of french fries, which is a connection that I am sure I would have never made. It’s really amazing to see how young minds work sometimes, isn’t it?

My favorite part of the video, hands down, is when she IDs the Greyhound, Jaguar and PUMA logos each as ‘a cheetah,’ one right after the other. I never really thought about how much alike all of those logos looked.

Fun video…hope you liked it.

I used to love working with them. I’d either drive or ride my bike into downtown Denver…their offices were on Blake Street, if I remember correctly. Above what was something like their third store. I’d meet with their IT & Marketing guy, his name was Oscar and he was a very nice guy. And whenever I’d leave the meeting, Oscar would be sure to slip me a couple of coupons for free burritos. I would have ridden my bike for a meeting every single day as long as Oscar kept giving me free coupons.

Qdoba is one of my favorite restaurants and the day they opened one in Saginaw was a very happy day, although if I ate there as often as I’d like to eat there, I’d probably weigh 300 pounds. Qdoba Mexican Grill is  a great example of building a brand through the consistency and high quality of your product. The interesting thing is that all the while they were building their brand, they didn’t even know what their brand was going to be.

When I first started eating there, they were still called Zuma. After a few years—around the time I started working with them—they had changed their name to Z-TECA. Around five years after that, they settled on Qdoba. So even though their brand name kept changing, they kept delivering on the promise of great food and trusted that if they made the food the focus of the brand, that they wouldn’t have to worry about the name. And here we are, however many years later and their strategy worked great obviously, because they’ve got 600 stores!

Congratulations, Qdoba! I look forward to copy and pasting this entry when you get your 700th, 800th, 900th and 1000th stores open.

The AMA isn’t talking about plain, old sloppy Photoshop work like this Katy Perry ad. (Can you spot the bad Photoshop work here?)

No, what the AMA is talking about are ads where women’s bodies are drastically altered to a point where they make the original proportions of the Barbie doll seem realistic. They’re right, advertisers do use Photoshop to create bodies that do not occur in nature. I know this for a fact because I was a part of the problem a few years ago when I worked for a big ad agency. Our number one client was one of the biggest beer companies in the world and we used women in a LOT of our work. Most beer ads feature women because beer drinkers, by and large, are men. So it stands to reason that an attractive spokesmodel is going to get the attention of the guys who are drinking the beer.

In the advertising industry, when you see a photograph of a woman, you can be sure that it’s been gone over pretty carefully with Photoshop (Katy Perry photo notwithstanding). Photos are retouched and have blemishes removed, color is enhanced, flaws in the photo are corrected and so forth. But often, it doesn’t end there…especially in the summer ads where many of the girls are shown wearing bikinis. I can remember getting marked up photo sheets asking to have a woman’s waist reduced, arms and legs “tightened up” a bit, cleaning up shoulders, etc.

So you’d bring this photo into Photoshop and you’d start off by making the standard color and blemish fixes. Then you broke out your clone stamp tool (the Photoshop equivalent of a surgeon’s scalpel) and start chiseling away. I will admit it’s fun work because you are basically creating something that isn’t real and the challenge is to do it in such a way that millions of people (or tens of millions) are going to see it and you’re not going to leave any fingerprints behind. It’s a challenge. In the end, you’d end up with something like the photo below (I could have used a more graphic example, but many of them involved scantily-or-less-clad women, so I went with a family-friendly alternative).

At first glance, what you notice is that the color is much better in the second photo and that the models skin is lightened and blemishes removed. Now look a little closer. Notice on the original photo that her collarbones really stand out? Well, this would never do so let’s just go ahead and airbrush/clone stamp it a little to make them less noticeable. Now what? How about that little bulge on her right side. I know that it’s just her rib cage jutting out a bit from the angle the photographer has her standing at, but I think we should shave a bit off there. So now, instead of going down and cutting inward, it’s a more gentle slope. And to wrap it up, let’s trim her left side, too. As it is, she already looks skinny, but you know what they say about cameras adding pounds? Let’s shave a couple of inches off the left side just to smooth her about a bit. Abracadabra!

This sort of thing goes on all of the time in the industry and it happens with guys, too, but it’s different. I once worked on a big campaign which featured wresting superstar Bill Goldberg. They had all of these intimidating shots of this HUGE guy, but we had to go through and fix those photos too. Not with his physique, though, we had to retouch the grey in his beard. I don’t think the vanity came from the Goldberg camp, though, because if you look at his promo shot below, there’s plenty of grey. I actually believe the creative director on the project thought the no-grey look made him look cooler which meant we’d sell more beer. I want to meet the guy who made his beer purchasing decision based on the lack of grey hair in Goldberg’s beard. To him, I offer a hearty, “You’re welcome, buddy!”

So what’s the answer to all of this? I guess I come down on the side of Photoshop here because it’s one of the most powerful tools in the modern graphic designer’s arsenal (sorry for the mixed metaphor). And like any tool or weapon, they can be very useful or very dangerous in the wrong set of hands. I think that we, as a society, are very quick to point fingers and we spend time looking for someone to blame, but this isn’t Photoshop’s fault.

Cheese or Font?

Head over and give it a shot.

So what I am going to do is the same sort of thing, but with corporate logos which gives me a lot more to work with. There are a few different ways I can do this and I’m still sorting it out, but I’ll get it started either next week or the week after. I know this isn’t a terribly exciting post, but I wanted to mention it just so that nobody thinks I completely blew it off. Stay tuned.

Point one: this was not a brawl or a riot, as I’ve seen it called on a couple of media outlets. It was a fight that spilled into the street. I’ve seen the same thing at several other bars on the street. It’s a sad-but-true fact of life that people fight in bars. Why do they fight? Because sometimes it is important to show you that I am, in fact, way more awesome than you. Speaking of bar fights, there is one bar on the street (not one of the bars that plays dance music, by the way) that has had a fight 2 out of the past 3 times I’ve been in there (in the past 3–4 weeks). One of the fights even spilled out onto the sidewalk. Where is all of the hand-wringing over that fight?

Come to think of it, the last fight that I can remember that got this out of hand didn’t happen at one of the dance bars either and involved mostly white guys, if I recall correctly. And in the case of that fight, it stemmed from a wedding reception and they actually did some property damage (which Saturday night’s fight didn’t do, I don’t think). Again, where was the hand-wringing? Where were the calls to shut down wedding receptions with country music?

There weren’t any, of course. Why not? Because Saturday night’s incident involved a bunch of black guys. And that brings me to this…

Point two: It makes me sad to see the number of comments with racist undertones (and some not-so-subtle comments) regarding this fight. Not just this fight, either, but with the overall neighborhood the past few months. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone make a comment regarding the neighborhood “getting a little dark at night” and I’ve also heard the n-word dropped more frequently over the past few months than I’ve heard in years. I’m hearing these thoughts and worse from people who you’d be pretty surprised to hear it from.

As far as comments on Facebook and the forums on mlive.com, connectmidmichigan.com go, I don’t even know what to say. It’s embarassing how poorly educated and ignorant people are sometimes. What do you think all of those comments about Bay City turning into another Saginaw or Flint are? Do you think they’re talking about crime rate? No, that’s code for black people. One idiot even suggested (jokingly, I hope) gating the city. What a douche.

Point three: Is Midland Street dangerous? No, it’s not. Somebody asked me today if I thought it was getting more dangerous and I rejected the question because it’s not dangerous down here. There have been more fights the past five or six months, but only a couple that have gotten really out of hand. And I’ve seen more fights involving white people than anything else, but we have to make a big deal out of this one? The problem on Midland Street on Saturday night wasn’t that they were black, it’s that they were drunk. If you don’t think that’s the truth, then why wasn’t there an uproar over the wedding party fight?

Point four: The Westown is taking a lot of heat, which is not entirely fair. Westown is the only nightclub (I use the term loosely, mostly because it’s the theatre I saw Footloose in, but it’s as close as we’ve got to a real nightclub), but they are hardly the only bar playing dance/hip-hop music. And they’re not the only bar who draws a crowd which includes African-Americans. I keep reading quotes how nobody is pointing the finger, but when I see people saying that they aren’t pointing the finger? Guess whose marquee is behind them on TV? And guess whose photo they choose to run on mlive.com?

Point five: This is an issue for ALL liquor-licensed and late-night businesses. Just because you don’t play dance music doesn’t mean that you’re not part of this, too. I know that when it comes time to talk about paying for additional security, there are going to be some bar owners who are going to pitch a fit over it and try to pass it all off on Westown and maybe a couple of other establishments, but that’s a joke. I’ve heard people in other establishments making comments about the number of black people (that’s not the word they used) on the street. I’ve heard the people working in these same establishments making the same comments. And I’ve heard people make  under-their-breath, racist comments out on the street. How long until that turns into a fight? Maybe you don’t own the powder keg, but you’re handing out books of matches pretty freely.

I think the city and the liquor-license holders—all of them—have a shared responsibility here. The problem is that you can’t get the liquor license holders to agree on anything. Lots of egos in the room and lots of bickering. The bars who cater to the sports-and-a-beer crowd don’t feel they should have to pay extra because some bars have a different crowd, but the fact of the matter is that the more people who are down here, the better it is for everybody.

Point six: The city needs to do more. I know that they’re crying bankrupt, but something has to be done. On Friday and especially Saturday nights, Midland Street is the highest concentration of people in Bay City. Add in youth, add in alcohol, add in a racial mix and how can the BCPD turn a blind eye to it?

I am not an expert on city finances or anything like that, but I know that the budget is stretched way past thin. The police have a police reserve that they use for crowd control during big events. Can a combination of officers and reservists walk a beat? I think there should be a police presence late weekend nights anyway because this is a highly trafficked area at that time, so it would make sense that this is where some police should be. Maybe you have to pass on any additional cost on to the late-night businesses (I don’t know that it’s fair to pass it on to the many businesses who aren’t open at night).

It’s important to note here, that you can’t blame the police, either. In the past, some bar owners told the city (at Midland Street District meetings) that they didn’t want too heavy of a police presence here because it might scare people away.

Point seven: Kevin Novellino is a friend and I support his right to say what he wants and I genuinely understand his anger, but as a neighborhood business owner and a city commissioner, I think he had better ways to handle this without giving people the impression that Midland Street is dangerous. I share Kevin’s frustration because, like Kevin, I want our neighborhood to make everybody feel comfortable and I think it’s reckless to just put a video out there on Facebook.

There was supposed to be a meeting last week with district business people along with Kevin, the chief of police and somebody else in city management, but Kevin wasn’t able to deliver on his assurance that he’d have the chief of police and city manager there. Not only that, but he didn’t bother to show up himself. So to say that nobody is listening is pretty disingenuous.

Point eight: Finally! Something to get people all riled up about on local news! Thank goodness for the local news. Winter is still at least a few weeks away. If it weren’t for this story of danger lurking in our friendly bar district, what ever could we use to scare the citizenry. Better stock up on bread and milk, everybody, there is a band of marauding hooligans waiting to get you!

In summary: This is a problem, but it isn’t an unsolvable problem. It might not be easy to come to a solution, though, because there are so many egos involved. At some point, all of the interested parties—neighborhood businesses, property owners, representatives from the city and police—need to sit down and talk about what can be done to improve safety on the street. Whether that will happen or not is the real question. The glacial pace of progress in Bay City is really not going to do us any favors, that’s for sure.

I feel like I probably didn’t say everything that I meant to, but I do feel better after writing it. Thanks for reading.

So as you can see from the graphic above, for over 20 years the Gap had the classic Gap logo. Then last week they decided to spring a new logo on the world. The new logo, officially announced on October 8, went over about as well as the new Coke recipe back in the 80′s. People hated it and the internet was awash with critical tweets, Facebook posts and blogs (including this one).

A few days later, the Gap saw the light and killed the new logo and reverted to the original. There was actually an interesting in-between announcement when someone from the Gap (I can’t remember who and am not curious enough to look the name up) made the announcement that the new logo was just part of a process and that they loved the feedback from the public. They loved it so much, in fact, that they wanted crowdsource a new logo. Hey, everybody’s a designer! Send us your ideas for free and we’ll use it. Here’s a Gap gift card for $50. Thanks!

The only thing professional designers hate more than bad design is crowdsourcing. It completely devalues graphic design as a profession. I’ve written about it before and I probably will again, it’s just a way for companies to get something for nothing while turning design into a commodity. Naturally, the internet lit up again with protests from designers about what a stupid idea it was.

In the end, Gap made out okay from all of this. While not everybody knew about the logo change, they were one of the most hotly debated (not much of a debate, I guess, when everybody hates what you did) topics on the internet, even making their way into print and broadcast media. Suddenly, everybody was talking about the Gap. The chain received an overwhelming amount of feedback at no additional cost and were able to pull themselves back from the bring before it cost them a fortune (unlike Tropicana who took it in the wallet with their package redesign-and-reversal process). And in the end, Gap relented to popular demand, which gives people the feeling that Gap really does care about their customers.

It’s been suggested by some that this is all a PR ploy, but I don’t think so. Why not? Two reasons. First of all, if they were trying to pull something off, I think they’d come up with a better fake logo. This logo was too bad to have been done on purpose, I think. Second, the whole crowdsourcing thing. If they were being advised, that would have never come up.

I just think it was a very large company exercising very poor judgement. It happens.

Anyway, welcome back Gap logo, we hardly missed ye.

While the classic Gap logo is a little dated, I am really underwhelmed at the new logo. It’s Helvetica bold and a blue box that is, for some reason, partially obscured by the p in Gap. The blue box looks like an afterthought, thrown in at the last minute. It’s like they looked at the Helvetica word mark and just KNEW it needed something extra. I imagine an exchange going something like this:

“I like it. It’s bold, yet classic. This mark is going to be with us for a long time,” the creative director says. “But maybe it needs just a little something extra. Something that really gets the brand across. We need something really designy.”

“We could put the whole thing in a shiny-looking circle sort of like the 989 Design logo at the top of this page,” the graphic designer says.

“A shiny 3d-looking circle? What is this? 2008? We need something that SCREAMS 2010 and beyond!”

“Well maybe we try using a box. We had a box in our last logo and that one lasted a long time.”

“Hmmm…a box, you say?” replies the CD. “Yes, I like the sound of that. But it can’t be the same…it needs to be a little different.”

“How about I give it a gradient fill?” asks GD.

“YES! Now you’re talking. More, give me more.”

“We make the box really small and…um…put it before the G!”

“No…box first isn’t forward thinking enough,” says the CD. “I’ve got it. Randomly stick it behind one of the letters.”

“How about behind the p?” asks GD.

“Perfecto! It’s a masterpiece.

It’s not that it’s a terrible logo…it’s just really bland. Nothing says design or style. They’d have done better for themselves, in my opinion, by keeping the old look, adding the gradient and updating the font. Bam! Done. They were so busy trying to think outside the box (pun intended) that they stepped on the design.

I think anybody who is starting a business or ready to take their business to the next level should give the article a read. It’ll only take about five minutes to read, so click the link above and check it out.

There were a few items in the piece that I thought were important enough to warrant a mention here.

Many companies skimp on logo creation. Nowhere is this more true than with small businesses. Throughout the region, I’ve seen thousands of business cards and signs and I can tell you who spent money on a designer and who didn’t. In this area, you see a lot of businesses who try to do it themselves or let their sign company design their logo. Bad letter spacing, poor font choice, use of clip art—these all give potential clients cues as to what kind of business you are running.

A great example of this is a restaurant I know. Their logo was clearly put together by a sign shop or a nephew or something. The typography on the sign is horrible. Poor font choice, poor use of the poor font, weird spacing, etc. I happen to really like this restaurant, but this sign is a great indicator because good as the food may be, the service is often pretty bad. You can sit waiting for service for 30 minutes when there are only two other tables in the place. Just horrible, sloppy service. And that’s exactly what their sign promises—sloppy and not thought out.

Planning and research in logo design is critically important. Whenever I design a logo for a client, I ask a lot of questions, but before I even meet with them I want them to do some of the legwork for themselves. Sit down and really articulate what it is you do, what you want people to think of when they think of your business and stuff like that. If you can’t tell me what you are, how can I tell anybody else?

I also highly recommend looking at other logos in your industry (websites, too, for that matter). Not to steal anybody’s logo, but to get a feel for what others are doing in the field. Maybe your initial idea is a cliché or maybe it’s too abstract. A logo doesn’t have to be a picture of what you do, but it is very hard for a smaller company to make the associations between abstract logos and their company brand.

Hire a professional designer or, at the very least, consult with a professional. Of course I am going to recommend this. Yes, it’s self-serving advice, but it is also solid advice. They give price ranges from $4,000–15,000 for logo design, but I’ll be honest and say that I’ve never had a $15,000 logo design project. If anyone has an extra $15K laying around, though, I promise that I will design you a SUPERKICKASS logo.

The truth is you can have a great logo designed for less than $4K, too. Every job is a little bit different, so don’t let those numbers scare you off from talking to a designer. There are a bunch of talented designers in the Tri-Cities, so you have a lot of people to choose from. Beware, though, because for every good designer there are at least three or four hacks masquerading as designers. How do you tell the difference? Look at their past work. Look at the logos they’ve designed. Look at the clients they have worked for.

If you have very strong ideas for your logo, most designers will be happy to work with your ideas. Mostly likely you are going to need a designer’s expertise anyway because you probably don’t have the skill set needed to create your logo in the formats you will need for printing. And if you give a designer your ideas, maybe their experience will give them a couple of ideas that you didn’t think of.

Don’t think of a logo as a one-time cost. A logo is designed to last for years (this article says it’s a minimum of 10 years, but I think it’s closer to 7 years because things/times/businesses change and grow and you have to allow for that). The point is, though, that you are not using your logo one time. It’s the one thing that everybody sees on  your signage, your ads, your business cards, your vehicles, etc. Think about the cost of logo design as being amortized over the life of the logo…5 years, 7 years, 10 years…whatever. It is a big check to write at one time, yes, but if you take the time to do it right, it will serve you well for years.

A well-designed logo tells potential customers who you are, serves as a visual reminder of what you do, and helps solidify your top-of-mind position. Logo design is one of the best investments you can make in your business, whether you’re just starting or if you’re due for an update.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and, seriously, read the Entrepreneur article, too. It’s a good piece.

Recently I had an experience with Staples that served to reinforce the notion of employees being a vital part of your brand. I had to prepare some comps for a client meeting and sent them to Staples to have them printed. Generally, I use Staples for this sort of work because they have high-quality color printers, produce the work relatively quickly and aren’t too expensive.

I have had a few bad customer service experiences with Staples print center, mostly due to the inexperience of some of the people working there. By and far, though, my experience with the Bay City location has been positive.

On this particular order, though, I sent the files with EXPLICIT instructions, in hopes of avoiding any issues. The girl working at the copy center called me to confirm the order and that she would have them done very quickly. I went to pick the order up and it was wrong. The files, which were larger than 11″ x 17″, needed to be reduced to fit the page, but they were printed at full size and parts of the pages were cut off. The Staples co-worker told me that what I asked for couldn’t be done. I was really annoyed to have to pay $10 for work that was wrong, but the co-worker couldn’t fix it.

I was probably a little more curt with her than I would like to be, but I was furious. I had an 8AM meeting the next day and had to show up with bad proofs. The girl working there felt bad for me and talked to her supervisor (who was not in the store while I was there). The supervisor took it upon herself to call me and let me know that it was an easy fix and that the girl who ran the prints just needed to push one button. The supervisor offered to reprint everything for me and have it ready for me to pick up in the morning. I explained that I needed the prints an hour before they opened and she talked to the store manager—who comes in before 8AM—and told him what was going on.

She called me back and gave me the manager’s phone number so that I could come at 7:30, call him and pick up my proofs in time for my meeting. The supervisor’s follow-through was really impressive. And when I picked up the prints in the morning, the manager was both very friendly and very apologetic. By this time, all had been forgiven. Staples really did make up for their screw up and by going out of their way to make sure that I had what I needed, they reinforced what I already feel about them.

When I was a general manager for kinko’s (sorry FedEx, but I can’t bring myself to call it FedEx Office), we were at a managers meeting (in Austin or Cincinnati, I think) and we reviewed a customer service case study. The point of the study is that customers actually have a higher opinion of customer service from companies who have screwed up and recovered. Because this was almost 20 years ago, I can’t remember the actual figures, but the way it works out is that if you consistently perform very well, customers’ opinions stay equally constant. If you make a mistake and recover from it, overall approval ratings end up higher than if you had never made a mistake.

Staples is a great example of this very thing. Because they stretched themselves a bit to make sure that my needs were met, I really think very highly of their customer service. I was never going to boycott them or anything like that, but I’d be less inclined to go there if I need something. As of now, though, I will have no such hesitation.

Good save, Staples.