Logo Change 2008

I think the cool thing to do in 2008 is change your logo.

Arby's and Wendy's are. Best Buy is. And so is Pepsi. Yahoo! started wearing purple, baby (instead of red). As I looked at my Walmart receipt the other day, I found yet another logo alteration. And remember Starbucks’ desire to go back to a nearly nude mermaid in May (the “new” from May was actually a re-working of an early company logo)?

In fact, Brand New is a blog dedicated to these sorts of changes.

And all of this is for what? For those companies to increase their mindshare with a fresh branding statement? I’m not sure that a new logo translates directly into increased revenue.

Sure, the gurus say that sometimes a logo change is exactly what a company needs—especially if they are changing their services (like from a print shop to a marketing firm), undergoing a merger or recovering from some corporate scandal.

But it seems to me that most of the time, logo changes don’t capture the attention of the masses for longer than a few days.

So why change? Maybe changing a logo isn’t about capturing attention at all. Maybe it’s about changing attitudes. Maybe the companies above want to send a subtle message to the masses.

Perhaps Walmart is trying to say, “We really are friendly! (Even though we lost a huge labor lawsuit in Minnesota)” And maybe Yahoo! is saying, “See how passionate we are, we’ve painted everything purple! (So stop using Google, okay?)”

There is an easier way to grab attention and change customer attitudes about your company. And that’s by being what you say you are.

Let’s face it—Walmart wouldn’t have to think “friendlier” if it were actually better to its workers.

Yahoo! wouldn’t have painted their entire corporate headquarters purple if their shares weren’t trading for pennies. Well, not pennies exactly. According to Google (ahh irony) Yahoo (YHOO) closed at $11.58 per share on October 27. Year highs were over $34.00.

In the coming months, I’m not sure that clever branding initiatives are going to dupe consumers. Mark Penn (the guy who discovered the “Soccer Mom” voting bloc in America) writes in the intro to his book Microtrends:

“Too often…marketers don’t believe the facts or the issues matter that much. Oftentimes it is they who are the fools.”

So here is the question: Are people one big group of scatterbrained buffoons, or do people actually make methodological decisions based on individual values?

I think that question will dramatically alter how we market throughout this recession. Do we continue to market a blanket ideology to consumer-buffoons, where products are linked only tangentially to some desirable state of being (like a commercial for a department store that shows a happy family eating dinner)? Or do we market actual products and services to reasonable individuals?

I think I feel an example from Barak Obama’s campaign website coming on (only because McCain’s site doesn’t have all the features that Obama’s does). But that will have to wait until later.