Public Re-Branding Lessons Learned

Written by Mark Elliott, president

Taking lessons from some very public company re-branding efforts recent failures, Yahoo! wisely opened a public forum for how their own re-brand was to take shape and learned from their audience along the way.

Yahoo shared their creative executions that demonstrated options and how their process evolved over a 30-day timeframe. During that time, public comments were generated along the way. It will be extremely interesting to see how Yahoo’s approach works out for the search giant.

In many ways the sharing of some of the creative process provided a sense of consumer buy-in. This also allowed Yahoo to maintain control of the process, an all too important lesson learned from The Gap’s recent rebrand epic fail.

The Gap’s effort to rebrand provided a very public display of how consumers have taken control of public brands and in many cases driven decisions. Their shiny new logo and creative strategy was overturned by public opinion and reverted the brand’s identity mark back to its classic original form and typestyle. Not only was this a tremendous embarrassment, but also demonstrated the power of the socially connected consumer and shift of public brands control to the people.

Stay tuned and let’s see how this turns out. On some level I feel the two case studies mentioned are on a different plane. The Gap has a little more passionate consumer base, while my personal feelings around Yahoo are somewhat “Yahhoocares….Google is where it’s at”.  The funny thing about search engines and logos is Google experiments with its logo and passionate customer base almost every day.

One recent Google Logo treatment honored Nobel Prize Winner Jane Addams.  Not my favorite by any stretch but topical, connected their audience and ties into some consumers passion.  This strategy brings people back and keeps the brand fresh all at the same time. Brilliant.

 

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