EG, I buy battered fish in a blue box, the box disappeared from my main grocery store. When I went to my less visited store, it was gone there too. Literally, I just picked a random replacement brand.
Another thing which gets me, is marketers think everyone buys things weekly. And I once noticed a product I was hunting for with "New look!" on the box, but if was the last of the "New look!" boxes, the ones behind tem were missing the pronouncement.
I'm buying fish sticks here, and I do so once every 6 months, and throw a bunch of boxes in my deep freeze.
I'm not tied into what "exciting change" some yahoo thinks their product is going through, nothing is exciting about the food I buy, I just want fish sticks.
The box could remain the same for 100 years, and I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish.
UI designers ruined Gnome, ruined my fish sticks, ruination upon us all due to UI designers.
I don't want "new and improved". Stop it! Leave my tasty thing alone. The number of times I've changed brands, and never gone back, because "improved"...
And the worst, I buy frozen pizza. Unlike my fellow shoppers, I buy for the best crust flavour, and only meat.
Why?
Because if you want good frozen pizza, buy great crust, meat only, the put fresh veggies on it! Meat freezes well, not so much veggies.
Lately, one brand has added "croissant crust" and also "cheese in crust", and unless a supermarket is the size of all creation, it doesn't have room for one brand with 8 types, by 3 styles.
The result? The best crust, without extra calories(cheese), is now impossible to find.
I had to switch brands.
Just stop it ffs!
New coke was released, because they were being forced to change their formula. Some say they released new coke, knowing they'd have to re-release old coke, but that by that time the average person would not accurately notice the taste change.
A friend of mine, a coke fan, kept a case of old coke. He tried the newer-old coke, side by side...
It didn't taste the same.
Some say new coke was a wild success. Loads of media attention, and they dropped the formula change in without notice...
The New Coke story is quite interesting, but I don't buy in to most "explanations" of it. I think it's far more likely it's a case of "competitor X is more popular! We need to do something! Let's copy competitor X!" This is a classic business mistake, because customers are choosing you instead of X because it's not X, and if you merely copy X you lose your value.
It was so good that I refuse to buy regular Nutella anymore, even though the "extra cocoa" edition seems to be no longer sold.
We changed our recipe to increase our margins and the testers didn't even notice! You're gonna love it too.
They've been my favourite snack for years. I'm gutted.
Of course, if you are not price conscious then you can mostly avoid these issues by buying the most expensive of everything, but you're talking frozen pizza here...
For me, out of the brands I can try locally, its crust seems best.
See this comes down to simple maths though. If you can retain enough of the loyal customers and win some news ones with the "exciting change", the net difference is worth it.
This keeps happening so I guess the maths checks out.
The original comment that started this thread listed a bunch of plausible and probable causes of branding changes, and all of them are only rational from the point of view of an individual and orthogonal at best to the improvement of the business they are working for.
Many modern UI "designers" are certainly not worth of that name, in that they change things not according to systematic study and observation, but only due to their own hunches and personal preferences.
Usability studies have so many confounding variables that it's not even funny. It's not hard to pick studies to support anything. As if that wasn't enough, they're highly contextual and inevitably used in a completely different context.
None of the well known great designers of the past century relied on A/B studies to do what they did. Granted, they likely delivered a lot of duds too, but at least those designs could be identified as bad.
Designs with statistics behind them can never be bad because the numbers haven't changed, and the numbers was what motivated the change in the first place.
This is too much even. Of course it's better if the taste doesn't change. But there is a huge I've already bought this before in my buying patterns. Unless something becomes unserviceable I'll probably keep buying it.
However, the marketing teams get bored of their branding and ads way way before consumers do - after all each consumer see a big brand in a branding context maybe half a dozen to a dozen times a month for a few seconds at a time in advertising or stores. The marketing teams see it every day every hour :-)
So they naturally desire for change - exacerbated by the fact that the "experts" in marketing agencies or relevant in house functions have no incentive to tell them different as they make money off of the change :-)
Maybe the marketing teams from 12 big non-competing companies can "rotate" and do the work for a new company every month, coming back "home" once a year. Keep the eyes fresh.
(You’re also basically describing the plot structure of Mad Men!)
Apparently marketing may have it worse.
Why?
Etc. Etc. etc.
What really strikes me is the lack of customer centricity in all this. Do they want the change? Do they think the existing look is outdated? Do they like the old look? Pah. Who cares! I have a legacy to cement and a bonus to secure!
(Besides the usual MBA word-vomit mumbo jumbo like 'modern utility', but we all know those are just made up excuses)
Maybe a brand should just be... a brand. A brand isn't your friend, it isn't human, it isn't alive, and it most certainly only exists to take your money and put it in their account -- and, in tech, more often than not through some rent-seeking subscription model because nobody likes us actually owning anything anymore.
It's good you clarified that, because I know black males are never insensitive.
I tease. But I do see the value of being mindful of cultural differences in companies that employ a diverse workforce. No, it has nothing to do with the taste of the orange juice, but understanding where your colleagues are coming from is still productive. The typical employee probably is unaware of cultural differences that might come up with colleagues from cultures they're unfamiliar with. I'm thinking mainly here of cultures that have different values or practices from the dominant culture in the company, like a devout Muslim or Orthodox Jew working for a secular American company.
Though, yes, people who build their career on diversity tend to go a bit further than just preventing stuff getting lost in translation across cultural divides, probably for similar reasons to why brands can't just be left alone.
Diversity isn’t about the color of one’s skin, it’s about what that means when embedded in Western society.
What you seem to be looking for is not a brand but a label or a certification perhaps ?
If IKEA or Apple suddenly changed their aesthetic, they are probably going to be pushing out the same products... just with different packaging. The companies themselves remain the same as they were. People will have different feelings, depending on their reaction and how the branding people message this change, but ultimately the move is pointless as everything continues as before.
For an extreme example, look at the Blackwaters or Facebooks of the world.
Apple has a very strong brand, and if tomorrow they switched their logo and brand image to a cursive Ford style blue one it would need a strong justification behind it, a ton of employees would see such a change in a very negative way, and possibility think long and hard about their career path going from there, as the management might have lost their way.
Or the other way: when “Apple Computers” became “Apple” it wasn’t some random surface level change, but a reflection of how the company had deeply changed focus compared to its earlier days.
Branding and culture are rarely decoupled, and if any of those are strong enough they’ll change in lockstep.
PS: on brand and logo “refreshes”, like Peugeot moving to more a stylized lion, while those are arguably cosmetic, there is the same philosophy applied to the worker pool with “new blood” introduced to the company and processes and manufacturing moving along. In a way, the same thing is happening below and above the surface.
It's probably inevitable. We've reached peak abbreviation and minimization anyway.
Apple is defined by negative space. They are not complicated. They are not the same as everyone else. They are not spying on you(Or so some claim).
All the apple fans I know talk about simplicity and privacy more than any specific feature, and a lot of them appreciate simple things in all areas of life.
Changing the logo might really mess with the sense of simple quality.
- System 1,2,3,4,5,6,7
- Mac OS 8
- Mac OS 9
- Mac OS X
And it remained at "X" for about 16 years, with sometimes substantial releases being distinguished just by a big cat name or a decimal point. Arguably the "X" part stopped being part of the versioning, and simply became part of the brand but it was definitely redundant and "mac oh-ess-ex" is at best a bit clunky to say.
It certainly wasn't necessary, but I can at least understand why they'd want to do it.
macOS also aligns with capitalization of iOS, which is the more widespread brand.
Marketing these days is full of technical details. Digital campaign statistics. CRM. Automation. Tiny optimisations, analytics and such.
Branding lets everyone be involved. Everyone can have a say. A logo change rarely succeeds or fails. You don't have to know anything to make decisions or sound smart. Everyone notices it. Crusty old board members notice, and might comment on the work. Etc.
It's high visibility, low effort, low stress, low bar work.
I'm not implying that great branding doesn't exist. Most of the examples here though... they just changed fonts to whatever is most fashionable now.
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/au/news/trace-the-130-year-...
For example, the quirky eBay logo was a great fit for a startup during the dot com boom, but the way typical websites look changed dramatically since then and the company became much bigger and professional.
At some point, a logo that doesn't get updated does start screaming "this is a company stuck in a time several decades ago".
> [...] at some point the logos do start to look outdated, either because the company evolves or because the world is moving.
This is simply not true. If your logo looks outdated, 10 years in, it was never a good logo to start with.
Logos need to be timeless.
They also need to to be recognizable though.
These are difficult to align constraints and only a tiny fraction of logo designers manage to produce logos that satisfy both.
Otherwise I agree 100% with parent. Suits meddling in affairs they have no clue of. Been there and seen that at two companies with previously good logos.
Both are about change – as is caring for your newborn when it shat it's diapers.
Or another one: it's like me saying what you said is like saying 'Penne Arrabiata' is a dish "that needs revisiting" because it hasn't been changed since yonx.
Millions of Italians would beg to differ. ;)
If your competitor starts diluting your brand mimicking your package with a cheaper replacement with the same colors, you need to offer some different to keep the brand alive. Had seen that before in milk packages (with a successful defense changing the lid shape)
This is not a disclaimer. This is, in fact, the opposite of a disclaimer. It is a "claimer", if you will, claiming experience and authority on the topic.
A disclaimer is when you state a reason why people might want to discount your opinion, usually due to a conflict of interest. E.g., "I work at Revolut."
I believe the word you both are looking for is "disclosure":
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/115850/disclaime...
But why they look similar is because, in the past logo drafts used to be hand-drawn by artists and now its being done by digital artists who first start with available library of fonts.
Companies hire external brand design agencies, and they tend to hire a few of the same well-known ones, which also set the trends for the rest of the industry.
- 72andsunny (Dropbox, Instagram, eBay)
- Moving Brands (Netflix, Asana, BBC, Eventbrite)
- Red Antler (Casper, Alto, etc)
Even with digital tools, many designers will still sketch them out.
The logo designs here are simply following what's on trend, rather than a reflection of tooling changes.
But there’s no way the first and subsequent Revolut logos have been influenced by radical tool changes. The same would go for Spotify or Yahoo, or airbnb.
Also a company requesting a whimsical logo would have no difficulty having it hand drawn if it fit the bill. There’s just way less demand for that, we’d need to look at “natural” adjacent businesses to get that vibe (e.g. https://naturalhihoney.com/ ), or restaurants.
https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...
Dropbox rebrand was panned as well. https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/11/dropbox-rebrand-logo-visua...
Oh yeah definitely related, it's an existential crisis for marketing/media to not be producing something new. To be fair to them, software developers are worse I feel.
If these industries were pragmatic, there'd be far less work to do. Instead, we re-brand/re-build every year, lest we all lose our purpose and our jobs.
How many working products haven't been rebuilt just to incorporate some tech du jour?
The fact that a good number of people gets fresh CVs in the process is never held against it.
There's a few different reasons (especially depending on the company) why that these happen, but I personally think it boils down to two unintuitive quasi-psychological reasons.
- When suits are fumbling around looking for a new shiny project that'll give them a sense of "legacy" and their fingerpints all over (that won't affect immediate profits), somewhere in marketing and brand is usually the first place they'll grab. If wins, fantastic, they've secured their legacy both in a career-spanning sense and at the company itself with a bonus. If it fails disastrously, easy enough to quietly switch back to the old and to save face by tackling a different project.
- Sort of relatedly, a lot of marketing suits hate feeling "left out" of trends; it's something I loathe about the industry, the hyper-focus and optimization of being at the crest of new trends (when arguably they're usually shittier than the previous ones). Oftentimes their entire salary / sense of purpose of being at the job is tied into with presenting the latest and greatest, and insecure designers will be too happy to be enablers.
(My opinion may be a minority of the industry itself as if it were me, we'd be back to 90's era logos for the sheer zany quality.)