Usable Interfaces

The people at Wolff Ollins must be kicking themselves. The 2012 logo seems likely to not just make them look like heartless corporate robber-barrons (where’s our £400k guys?), but may be part of the deathnell for the entire “branding” industry.

Russell Davies joins the cry for the end to the overuse of the term and its misapplication to just about anything so that consultants get to do their thing and charge their fees. John Dodd’s wants to see an end to branding experts.

The brand marketing debate seems to me to resemble in format the viral marketing debate. Just because you can perceive a phenomonen (the ‘viral effect’ of interesting information or consumers building long term value into brands), doesn’t mean that you can achieve that effect for yourself.

Is it true that brands exist? Yes of course. Does that mean that your product and service is a brand? We’ll let you know. Brands exist in the minds of consumers. They are what you get when you put together all building blocks of all of the experiences that consumer has of your product or service. You can influence them, but you can’t control them. Especially not nowadays.

And perhaps that’s the especially frustrating thing about 2012. The games was building a really strong brand image, in my perception at least. It was about worthy inclusiveness. It was about the success of the underdog through passion (the story of the bid itself). It was about regeneration and about the rejunivation of an old and tired area of an historic city. And now - all of a sudden - it’s become about a bunch of branding consultants, a large sum of money, and the inventiveness of the British at ripping apart an icon.

I know it’s not summer yet. But it’s going to come soon and it’s going to be full of crazy people. And the crazy people are going to work in marketing agencies and they’re going to be trying to reinvent the interweb. Here are some early starters:

Firstly some klutz at JWT clearly doesn’t know that Google Earth is a product name and not a generic. Rather more importantly is this candidate for most patronising and inelegant phrase I’ve heard for a long time: ‘read what people like you made of it’.

The site itself has some nice features and UI bits and pieces, as well as a (not bad) custom virtual earth. I can only assume they’re still working on the content. When you roll over the continental United States you get one clickable link which opens up to say: “Holidays in the USA will offer you the warmest of welcomes, the biggest of portions and lifetime of memories”.

Well I don’t know about you but I feel like I’ve been there before I even got on the plane. I might explore more with some user generated content. Although Thompson would like to make it very clear that any resemblence to trusting their customers is purely accidental:

Well they can’t be too careful what people like us might upload.

The ad was in good company. The newly updated information revolution ad was right next to it. Remember boys and girls, Google is too powerful so you should use Ask.com. That’s the same ask.com that only exists now because it ran Google ads for the last five years.

I’ve just changed jobs.

I used to wonder how anyone could stand changing jobs every two years (having left it somewhat longer). Well now I *really* don’t know. All that disruption, the new kettle to get used to, new systems, all those names…

Anyhow, amongst the multitude of things that are different about my new job (and it’s so different, it’s largely not really a question of better or worse) is the location.

Victoria was pretty cool but Southwark Bridge I think, has it. It’s near the brilliant Tate Modern building, the wobbley bridge, the Thames, Borough market, I walk past the globe every day, best sandwich shop I’ve ever been to, and to seal the whole thing, I got a boat to work today!

It takes about 30 mins longer than the tube. You have to pay a bit more and it’s a little bit more windy but what a marvellous thing. What a nice way to start the day.