The Brand Bull

I've had an interesting experience yesterday. I was invited for an interview on big companies' customer centricity (or rather the lack of it) by Radio1, the national quali radio station in Belgium. They had created a charter and companies were invited to the studio to sign it. You can imagine that all major companies from the energy and telecom markets were present to show their good will.
As I was at the end of the program, I was waiting outside the studio and was privileged to follow the official on air version as well as the 'backstage' comments.
One of the major energy providers had sent their spokeswoman. A very confident and mediatrained apparition that was sent out on her mission to reassure the world that the company she represented was already customer aware today and will be even more customer centric in the future. As a proud protector of her employer she declared that the average waiting time before their call center picked up the phone was 28 seconds. Which was a great average, but it directly reminded me of the story of the man who drowned in the river with an average water level of 20cm. While she was pronouncing her words in front of the microphone her (I suppose) assistant made a small victory dance outside the studio. Suddenly it became clear to me that for them the whole show wasn't about customers but about free publicity on national radio. It had nothing to do with an intention to change their attitude towards the customer. The host of the program immediately interpellated the spokeswomen on the impossible to understand invoices. The selfconfident spokeswoman had no clear answer. End of the interview.
Coming out of the studio, the assistant was clearly in a victorious flush. "You did great! And on the 28 seconds they had no reply! She (the host) immediately started about the invoices. That was low", she almost shouted.
In front of me were 2 brand bulls. Responsible for the official company declarations that their bosses didn't want to pronounce or didn't want to spend time on. The initiative of Radio1 was just anioher competition for them against the other providers. Their point of view had nothing to do with customers or customer centricity. It was once again an attack on 'the others' like a dumb bull running towards the red rag And at the same time a missed opportunity to get fundamental input and insights on their customers. Another missed opportunity to show interaction with the customer. Another missed opportunity to tell their story or to start conversating with their customer. I'll suggest to Peeters and Pical, the hosts of the show, to hang the red rag outside their studio so next time the brand bulls will stay out of the studio...

Dear customer, we still have a very long way to go...

The GAP Story: 7 days to quickly forget.

DAY 0

October 4, 2010

GAP introduces its new logo on its site. No fuss, no fanfare, no event, just done.

Down With Design Blog reports the new logo is no good: “I really can’t understand the thinking behind this move.” In no time designers express their discontent on the bad design. Some even offer GAP a free redesign of their logo.

October 6, 2010

Kitsune Noir Blog reports: “There was a lot of brand equity in that big blue square and they didn’t move far away enough from the source for this logo to even begin to feel new or exciting.” Twitter explodes and someone (is it GAP?) starts a Twitter to defend the change: http://twitter.com/GapLogo. Gap gets a ro and contra Twitter. The internet community starts talking about Gapocalypse.

October 7, 2010

The logo gets the official name of ‘monstrosity’. GAP states/pretends the new logo is just a way to create buzz for their crowdsourcing project to find a new logo. Their Facebook page says:

“We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to... see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.”

GAP is crowdsourcing for a new logo? No way. It’s just a bad PR recovery attempt the online community reacts. Since they want the world to create their new logo, where is the design brief?

Only the Time-NewsFeed seems to like the new logo. “NewsFeed personally does not mind Helvetica, and so this new logo brings to mind visions of a streamlined, technologically dominant future America where everyone wears white suits and cool glasses. Sure, it's generic, but don't you know that in the future everything looks alike?"

October 8, 2010

It takes GAP 2 days to react. Marka Hansen, President of GAP North America reacts in a column in the Huffington Post.

She states: “Our brand and our clothes are changing and rethinking our logo is part of aligning with that. We want our customers to take notice of Gap and see what it stands for today. We chose this design as it's more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward.”

She invites everyone to go into the dialogue and through their Facebook page people can send new proposals. How can she be defending a bad logo and at the same time invite people to make other proposals? One of the reactions says: “it (the logo) looks like something from a corporate powerpoint presentation”.

October 11, 2010

The GAP Facebook page end the story:

“Ok. We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers. So instead of crowd sourcing, we’re bringing back the Blue Box tonight. “

Bye bye new logo, bye bye crowdsourcing, helo old logo.

Marka Hansen’s full statement:

"Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, we’ve seen an outpouring of comments from customers and the online community in support of the iconic blue box logo.

Last week, we moved to address the feedback and began exploring how we could tap into all of the passion. Ultimately, we’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand. All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we’ve made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further.

At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels.

In the meantime, the website will go back to our iconic blue box logo and, for Holiday, we’ll turn our blue box red for our seasonal campaign.

We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community.  This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing.

There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way."

Hell yea... I hope so.

 

DAY 7 - the new logo on the site is the old one.

PS: For the occasion the blog is posted in Helvetica ;-)

Is it customer love?

Brands are often referred to as a person. They have an identity, values, a specific style, a certain character and specialists tell us that ‘a brand is like a friend’. So we have brand relationships with love brands or even lovemarks. Marketers must create loyalty through conversation with the customer and consumer and not the brand as such nor its manager but the social surrounding decides on what reputation your brand has.

Now, personification is a damn good trick in brand management as people have learned through evolution to think in examples and very concrete ideas. Meaning that abstract ideas are too hard to understand and even if we understand them, it still remains difficult to actually do something with these abstract ideas. So indeed, it is a good thing to see brands as a person and create brand relationships.

Going further into that thought, it might be interesting to see what actually helps to create a so-called love relationship between people and brands. (Knowing that I’ve never seen a customer weep because his brand was delisted or completely disappeared from the world - but let’s play this ‘brand love’ game.) Love is created through 3 simple methods.

1. Frequency

The more frequent you meet a person, the more loyal you will be to that person. That is the reason why so many (extramarital) relationships start at work: at a certain point you see them more than your own wife or husband and show more loyalty to your colleagues than to your official relationship.

Brands need to create frequency in contact. Just don’t forget to make it a relevant contact.

2. Recognition

That’s why recognition is also important. Sure, you’ll find examples of relationships where there is no recognition from one of the persons involved, but I’m talking about healthy, non-psychopathic relationships. Recognition means that you show that you understand the world of your customer/partner and its attending issues. Relevance is one good way to make sure that you create recognition, but there are other possibilities.

Brands must learn to show recognition to their customers without denying their own characteristic property.

3. Extremes

This might be completely new to marketers, but research has shown that there is a simple way to create a ‘crush’. (And as we all know, being in love is a great start towards real love.) Put 2 people together and let them experience extreme situations together -with a happy ending of course- and chances are high(er) that they will have a crush on each other. Danger is an Aphrodisiac.

Now this is a more difficult one: brands must dare to create more extreme situations with their customers.  

Seen the period of brand courage implosion, I wonder whether brands are up to this…