The holy grail of branding is to reach a place where consumers not only recognize and respect your brand, but fall in love with it, even identify with it – the difference between saying "I usually buy Budweiser beer" and saying "I'm a Bud man."
But this can create problems of its own. What happens when you want to update your brandmark, and it threatens to alienate your loyal clientele?
The latest company to find out is Yahoo!, which decided to change its familiar logo:
The new logo is a relatively modest departure: it features a different font, and a different shade of purple.
Yahoo! rolled out the winning redesign at the end of a thirty-day preview of other proposals that had been rejected. By the time you get through all of them (you can find them here) it's tough to tell some of them apart, let alone figure out why this one came out on top.
The company's CEO, Marissa Miller, described the winner as "whimsical, yet sophisticated," which sounds like something you'd hear at a wine tasting. Other descriptions have been, well, less flattering: "boring," "banal," "grade-school level," even "a horror show" and "worse than Hitler." (To be fair, some of these comments come from professional logo designers who seem miffed that Yahoo! didn't hire professional logo designers but did the work internally.)
So far at least, Yahoo! has escaped the fate of The Gap, the clothing retailer whose attempt to change its logo a couple years ago caused such an uprising among its customers that the company was forced to go back to the original (perhaps inevitably, the episode became known as "Logo-gate.")
As we've discussed here before, there are many good reasons to change or update your brandmark. But as Yahoo!'s experience illustrates, the process is not without its perils.
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