Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By Alyssa Royse

If the Gap branding debacle has taught us anything, it’s that everybody has an opinion, and the Internet is the world’s largest soapbox. That’s about it. (And that people might have better taste than I give them credit for, because that was easily the ugliest logo I’ve ever seen, and they paid money for it!)

Branding is a mystery – even to people who swear they know the answers and will charge you a lot of money to give them to you. (I assume that’s why The Gap did it.)  But, by focusing on a few salient truths, you can keep the process under control, and make it work for you.

1. The job of a brand is to sell product. 
This is the only thing that matters. Will your brand inspire the feelings necessary to convince people to buy your product? If you’re new to market, that’s going to mean everything from logo, to PR, to consumer evangelists getting the word out about your product. If you’re an established brand, it’s all that, plus a product that is consistent, cool and can be trusted. Any decision you make regarding your brand – logo, PR, events – has to address this single question: will this help us sell more product?

2. A logo is NOT a brand.
You can throw the best logo in the world on a pile of crap and you’re still only going to attract flies. Apologies to all the brilliant designers out there, but given the role of social media in brand-building now, a logo is more like a memory trigger than anything else. It is what allows people to easily recognize that, based on everything else they know about you, this is the one they should pick. I have seen people get excellent logos from places like LogoTournament.com for $300, then spend thousands to get a “complete logo package” that wasn’t nearly as good. If you’re a startup, that’s a big waste of money. Put those resources into building your product and real relationships with your customers.

3. If it aint’ broke, don’t fix it. If it is broke, a logo won’t fix it. I have no idea why the Gap set about on this Quixotic campaign – which was really just a logo redesign. Their brand was making money, easily recognizable and holding steadily on to marketshare. There was no reason to do it.

There are good reasons to rebrand.

Target, for instance, did a huge rebranding to take themselves from “cheap crap for poor people” to “chic products for fiscally responsible consumers with taste.” However, they did more than change their logo. They hired top-notch designers for exclusive product lines, they redesigned their interiors, they changed the locations of their stores, they changed how and where they advertised. They rebranded, and it worked, because they changed every single thing about how they interacted with the public.

On another scale, the 122 registered voters in Detroit, Oregon will vote, on election day, on whether or not to change the name of their town to Detroit Lake. Why? Because the “brand” of Detroit, right now, is one of a rundown Rust Belt city rife with crime and decay, not the image that this sporty Oregon town needs to attract tourists. Good reason.

There are also stupid rebranding examples out there. Most of them were unnecessary. Tropicana changed all their labeling and hired celebrity pitch people, which seems to have backfired. Suddenly consumers didn’t recognize the product on the shelves, many reporting that they now looked like generic brands, and they switched to another brand.

Remember “New Coke?” Ya, I didn’t think so.

For what it’s worth, after nearly a decade of having MSNBC.com as my homepage, when they rebranded and got all flashy and filled with slow-loading video content that I can’t read if I’m around other people (because I have to watch it,) I switched to Yahoo News as my homepage, and haven’t been back to MSNBC.com since. They made the “wrapper” flashier (and probably spent a lot of money to do so,) but made it impossible to consume the product. Oops.

4. If it don’t drive sales, don’t do it. Steve McCallion wrote a great piece in Fast Company about the lessons of The Gap branding debacle. It’s a great read, though I don’t agree with a lot of it – and I could easily be wrong.  One of his assertions is that brands need to be engaging social media and real-world events to connect consumers to the brand. He cites Nike’s iPhone apps, and Converse building a recording studio to support up and coming musicians in Brooklyn.

I’m skeptical of ploys like this. They are expensive and time consuming, and ultimately take your eye off the product – shoes. Sure, the Nike app is cool, if you already run with the Nikes that have chips in them, but it won’t convince me to buy Nikes, and there are plenty of apps that I can use with the footwear of my choice. As for Converse building a recording studio…. Why? They could just give converse to hip singers for less, and get more eyeballs. Or have hip singers design shoes and sell them. Or sponsor a contest on YouTube. I don’t see how this drives sales.

5. Customers are more important than logo designers and branding specialists.
Ultimately, branding gets down to how your consumers feel about your product, and how easy (and rewarding) it is for them to tell other people about it. Quality drives sales, evangelists build marketshare. It’s that simple. (Simple, of course, is not the same as easy.) The best example I can think of here is appallingly simple, and was free for the company.  When LivingSocial sold me 6 laser hair-removal treatments for $120, I was unbelievably thrilled. When they told me that if I got 3 other friends to buy it, I could have it for free, I happily posted it to my Facebook and Twitter, with the click of a button. No fancy logo. No fancy anything, just a perfect product, motivation to talk about it, and a very simple way to do so. Which happens to be totally consistent with their brand – great deals, no hassle.

Personally, even though I thought the new Gap logo was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen,  it wouldn’t have made any difference one way or the other. People weren’t going to stop buying their product. The whole hubbub was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Which, coincidentally, is what a lot of branding is anyway. Make yours count. Just like your mom always told you, it’s what’s on the inside that matters – it’s as true in business as it is in love. Bling may get people to notice you, but it won’t make them love you.
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Alyssa Royse has always believed that it’s what inside that matters, and is easily turned off by flashy things, because she assumes they’re trying to distract her from what’s inside.

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