Kellblog

Branding always has it problems. Often, they’re international in nature; remember the Unix systems vendor Arete? They had big problems in France where arrete means “stop.” Who wants to buy the stop computer?

Sometimes, they’re cultural — I remember at Business Objects when the (English) product manager for BusinessMiner proposed a product icon that had two huge letters BM along with a flashlight running across them. I also remember when I lived in Paris literally begging the French to stop abbreviating Business Objects as “B.O.”

But I digress.  Sometimes, the brand name is just dumb. Remember Monday? Some professional services firm (was it PwC?) was trying to rebrand itself as a day-of-the-week right before they were acquired. Imagine this conversation: “hey, we’re meeting with the Monday guys on Tuesday … or was it the Tuesday guys on Monday.”

In that vein, I am frankly amazed that UPS has continued its “brown” campaign for so long. Are they actually trying to re-brand themselves as brown (as the tagline “what can brown do you for” suggests), or is it a just an expense exercise in synonym creation? While I’m riffing, one wonders if the Mexican Groupo Bimbo should regionally brand their “Bimbo” baked good products much as we call it Hellman’s mayonnaise on the East coast and Best Foods out West, or Hardee’s in some states and Carl’s Junior in others.

Sometimes you successfully run the gauntlet of brand naming only to explode on logo design.

I remember once at (the original) Ingres when marketing spent hundreds of thousands on a new corporate identity only to discover from an engineer at the internal launch that: “the logo looks just like Borland’s new logo.” But by then it was too late to do anything: new cards had been printed, new signs had been made, new ads had been placed. Watching that one experience permanently cured me from the “unveil mentality” that I see common in most marketers.

But this post was inspired by a story in the UK’s Telegraph about the Office of Government Commerce which, despite a simple and descriptive name, managed to blow up on the logo design. Viewed as intended, the logo is a simple set of initials. But in the text message, emoticon culture of today people don’t always view things as intended. Often you look at things sideways, as with the smiley face :-) emoticon.

Sadly for the OGC and its design agency, I guess they didn’t show their new logo to enough generation Y types because, when viewed sideways, the otherwise-innocuous logo resembles, … well, of all things, an aroused snowman. Whoda guessed?

The simple moral — don’t unveil; show your draft work early and often to a wide variety of people.

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End note:  I revised the post revised to remove the accidental inclusion of not one, but two, urban myths: the Chevy Nova anecdote and the Gerber baby food tale (about which I admit being a bit nervous while typing, but heck, it made it into Harvard Business Review in 1984).

I’ve been traveling a lot recently (including a nice vacation at Club Med in Mexico) so please excuse the hiatus in posting.

In restarting, I thought I’d blaze out of the gates with a controversial marketing rant on user conference branding provoked, in part, by a Stephen Arnold post on his Beyond Search blog about (what I consider) the disguising of Nstein’s user conference.

Stephen comes from a different place than I do; his focus is to question whether users should attend these topical, vendor-driven conferences or topical, vendor-neutral ones? In some sense, I think he’s taking the bait. Fact is, these supposedly topical conferences simply aren’t: they’re user conferences wearing wigs and lipstick.

Don’t believe me? Then see the descriptive copy on Nstein’s site: “… to create a unique user conference for executives & technical developers …” They buried it, but it’s there.

My question to marketing VPs is simple: when did “user conference” become a four-letter word? Why do marketing teams insist on dressing their user conferences up in wigs and lipstick? Examples:

• Endeca’s Discover
• Nstein’s Innovation Leaders Summit
• Business Objects’ Insight
• SAP’s Sapphire
• Cognos’ Performance

I have three problems with these faux-topical conferences:

• They’re brand dilutive. Does Nstein really believe that people will say, “hey Joe, are you going to the Innovation Leaders Summit this year?” Sure, given enough size and money you can actually achieve that goal — people really do say “are you going to Sapphire?” — but even when you succeed you fail because you’ve diluted your branding. What’s more, if asked, “hey Joe, what’s Sapphire?” he’ll say “the SAP user conference.” All you’ve done is to create a synonym, and where’s the marketing value in that? And, sure as the sun rises, marketing will print the conference brand on all those bags and t-shirts in 10x bigger type than the company brand. Heck, I’ve seen examples where they fail to print the company brand at all.

• They’re misleading. A disguised user conference isn’t a topical conference. If you went to the Insight conference hoping to hear case studies of how people have used Cognos or MicroStrategy to gather insight from data, then you were sorely disappointed. If you’re going to the Innovation Leaders Summit, don’t expect to hear how Elsevier, Oxford University Press, or Nerac have used MarkLogic to innovate in publishing. Good marketing doesn’t deceive.

• They’re confusing. Reversing the prior case, whither the poor Nstein user who wants to learn about product directions, network with fellow users, meet with product developers, and visit with corporate executives? Should he go to the Innovation Leaders Summit? No, he’ll think, it couldn’t be something high hifalutin like that. By misnaming the event you appeal to people who shouldn’t be there and fail to appeal to those who should.

I’m fine with themes. I think user conferences should have them to provide a unifying element to the program. And I think the themes should be topical. But when it comes to names and branding, just keep it simple.

• Call it the XYZ user conference, as we do at Mark Logic (“Discovering Agility” is the theme, not the name.)
• Or emulate Fast and Cognos who (now) use simple variants of the corporate brand that pretty clearly indicate it’s a user conference (e.g., FastForward, Cognos Forum)

Aside: Some might argue that Sapphire falls into the second category. While Sapphire clearly does not try to position the event as something topical (i.e., there’s no confusion with a gemstone conference), I don’t think it qualifies a good, simple variant either because the company is called S-A-P by some or “sap” by others and when you say “sapphire” you make neither of those sounds. SAP Forum or SAP World would be better imho.

Sure, there’s an appeal in giving your user conference a sexy name. And, yes, everybody else does it. But does that make it right? No. Does it make it good marketing? No. Does it serve your customers? No. All it does is train them not to believe you.

By the way, if you want to host a real topical conference, go for it. It’s a great idea, and I’ve done a few in my day. But if the event is your user conference, then just call it that. Don’t worry: if you have users, then they’ll want to come. (And if you don’t, you have deeper problems than your conference name.)

By the way, I’ll see you at the Discovering Agility conference — just kidding– at the Mark Logic User Conference in June.