Living All In

Not that this is a tech blog (tho I am a techie), but all this talk on brands, logos, marks, and tag lines comes front and center Monday when Cingular and its orange Jack splat is scuttled and the company is renamed AT&T.  The FCC rubber stamped the company’s merger late Friday and AT&T’s press room has posted the release here.

Yuck.

Is there more of a starched shirt, corporate tower mark than AT&T?  Besides IBM and Xerox of course…  Highly recognizable brands, sure.  But for what mobile phones and services have become (personal lifestyle extensions,) scuttling a highly effective brand and marketing campaign (Cingular) for a mark that screams rotary dial is mind boggling to me.  This is a case where AT&T should be a secondary heritage mark (see my Thomas Nelson logo post) utilized for business services and data network initiatives. 

If AT&T did an ad morphing Alexander Graham Bell’s first ‘can you hear me now?’ (take that Verizon!) to telegraph wires to huge fiber optic pipes underneath oceans touting innovation and a long history of doing business at the speed sound, wouldn’t you believe they had a bigger network than the geek guy and his posse from Verizon?  A bigger data network than Sprint?  Sure.  But AT&T and the iPhone?  Sounds like the chess club captain accompanying the prom queen to the ball.

I know, I know, AT&T is one of the most recognizable brands in North America and highly iconic world wide.  But American Telephone and Telegraph, no matter how you shrink it down, has a corporate first, little guy second, oppressive, and even ancient feel to it.  And ancient and corporate is the very opposite of what the wireless consumer wants to feel.  As far as BellSouth and SBC are concerned (home landline and business telecom services), the AT&T rebranding will probably be an upgrade.  But for the eclectic world of mobile subscribers, where freedom and expression are the goods of the day and the ‘every man’ is the consumer, we have to apply the soon-to-be-patented Hungry Planet branding test:

Take two brands and insert them into a futuristic movie about an organization that grows to govern the world.  Which would you choose to have a more optimistic view and less oppressive rule of the world?

AT&T or Cingular?

As my examples of Coke and Nike in the post The Perfect Mark Myth illustrate, AT&T is throwing away a mark that has great value in the personal mobile business.   All of this in favor of ’simplifying’ while ignoring the cultural climate that surrounds one of their largest markets of future growth (mobile) not to mention merely three days after the most anticipated mobile device ever is debuted as being a Cingular exclusive.

As a Cingular customer, say it ain’t so Jack.  On Monday, you’ll have succeeded in "lowering the bar" of branding to simply choosing the most famous mark instead of using your stable of marks to reach an increasingly personalized culture. 

Quick, name three corporate logos that are perfect.  You know, iconic, literally and figuratively.

Here are mine:

Apple
Nike
Coca Cola

See them in your mind’s eye?  A bite out of the apple, a swoosh, and a feminine-curved hour glass bottle with cursive writing.  Iconic, timeless, perfect one-size-fits-all brands right?

Wrong (sorta.)

Before I go on, let me preface this by saying this post is inspired by Michael Hyatt’s blog post asking about whether to remove "Since 1798" from the bottom of the Thomas Nelson logo.  In Hyatt’s post he offered up BMW and Nike as examples of effective "tag lines" that could be added to their logo (The Ultimate Driving Machine/Just Do It) to communicate TNP core purpose rather than 1798.   Here was my comment:

Mike,

We’ve re-worked our marks and branding and will be doing a reveal before ICRS (hopefully well before!)

Because of the size of your company and what you do, I’m guessing you’re going through the logo/brand/mark revistation process totally in-house.

If you were to hire an outside firm to guide you through the logo and branding process, especially one that has worked with professional and college sports, you’d be given primary, secondary, and tertiary marks for your brand. In other words, as one of your earlier commenters suggested, you’d have slightly different marks for different audiences and uses.

Because of the compelling PROS you noted, I’d suggest keeping "Since 1798" as part of your ‘Heritage Mark’. You might use this mark for Bibles, Bible reference works, as well as for certain communication materials for academic markets and ‘heritage’-motivated audiences.

BTW, the examples you’ve used (Nike, BMW, et al) selectively use those slogans rather than them being ever present with their logo. Plus, the reason the slogans are so recognizable is not because they are tagged to the rondelle of my 540i or stitched to the swoosh of Hayley’s gratis footwear from when she worked at Nike, rather, because of multi-million dollar ad campaigns the companies produced.

(Free) food for thought from Hungry Planet.

Subsequent commenters and TNP employees offered their thoughts and the vote was split fifty/fifty.

My point was they can have it both ways.  Having worked along side a couple of stalwarts in the branding industry and participated in some high visibility mark makeovers, I know it’s never an easy or quick process.  But a closer look at Nike or Coca Cola (let’s hold off on Apple for the moment) shows more marks than meets the eye. 

For instance, Coca Cola has numerous marks they use depending on the product or audience they’re targeting.  Here are more than a few:

the shape of the bottle
the distinctive cursive font
the ‘ribbon’ found on wide format advertising (and Diet Coke cans)
their name on a round red bottle cap/button for nostalgia merchandise (their ‘heritage’ mark):

the fat font used primarily with the word/mark ‘Coke’ (and Diet Coke):

the phrase "it’s the real thing"
the phrase "Coke is it!" (not currently seen in the wild):

So one of the most iconic companies in the world has at least seven distinctive but related marks dependent on the product and audience Coca Cola is wanting to promote or target.

And that’s my point, TNP’s ‘One Company’ initiative doesn’t have to force them to be a ‘One Mark’ company.  Remove the date ("Since 1798") from products that don’t need a heritage reference or are going to audiences that see age as potentially neutral or negative.  Insert it for heritage positive consumers and distribution partners.

Speaking of multiple marks, let’s look at Nike.  Sure, their boiled down essence is a simple swoosh.  Their universal mark.  But let’s look at some of their numerous variations and audience specific marks:

Nike Basketball:

Nike Tennis:

Nike Golf:

All Conditions Gear:

Their ‘heritage’ cursive font:

And those are just corporate marks not including celebrity brands like Air Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Lance Armstrong’s 10-2 or tag lines like "Just Do It" or "Bo Knows Bo".  A long post just to say if you have a mark, tag line, or logo element that connects with a significant audience (like "Since 1798"), use it for that audience in conjunction with your universal corporate mark or designated secondary mark.  For emerging (I’m not necessarily talking theologically here) or forward thinking audiences, leave it off.

In such an individualistic and customizable culture (check out the NikeID program where you build your own shoes online) and competitive global marketplace, one sole mark and tagline will never do.  Even BMW added the tagline "Sheer driving pleasure" to it’s international website and other select marketing materials to supplement the venerable "ultimate driving machine" tagline.

You really can have it both (or more) ways in branding your company.  And I think all these examples show that a company’s branding is never ever complete.  Witness Apple dropping "Computer" from it’s company name this week, ditching the rainbow apple a long while back, the font changes, and no one hardly ever uttering "MacIntosh" anymore.  Yet the MacIntosh smiley face is still present as the ‘Finder’ icon and used as a secondary mark. 

And how much market share does Apple need to gain before  ‘thinking different’ will be thinking the same?

Stay tuned for Hungry Planet’s new marks in our reveal later this Spring.  Our current tagline, in case you didn’t know, is "Feeding the World’s Appetite for Truth" though we don’t use it on everything.

BTW, did I mention I want an iPhone?