It was BBH Labs’ logo project back in April 2009, where they got 1,700 logo submissions and chose one, that got us fired up about including the public in the creative process. Since then we’ve learnt a thing or two from using the crowdSpring platform and did our very own logo experiment, where we got ordinary people to design us an R, an A or a K without them knowing what it was for  (using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform).

Now we’re taking it a step further: a never-ending RAAK logo project that integrates individual letter submissions into a perpetually changing logo made by (hopefully)  hundreds of people.

A company for everybody – A funny take on corporate logo design

We were inspired by designer Phil Seddon’s enthusiastic feedback on our initial branding experiment. So this time, we are setting restrictions as to what people can do. After many discussions about grid patterns and freestyle, Phil has created a framework for design that we think will integrate submissions in our new website look and feel.

Still, if an identity is about making a fancy logo, then we’ll probably fail. But if branding is about

• 1. making you stand out
• 2. making people remember you
• 3. communicating the core values of the business

then we’re doing quite ok.

We want our brand to reflect what we’re about:

open, social, digital, participatory, creative and constantly changing.

So this branding exercise is as much about the process of open collaboration as about the result.

And all the designs will sit in our Logo Archive, with links to the URL of choice of their creators.

You can find more practical info about how it all works and submit your design on the Logo Project page.

PS: We reserve the right to delete really egregious designs.

Social media is earned media, right? How do you get people to spread the word about a new soap, a typical fast moving consumer good (FMCG)?

In a recent report by Randall Helms – Suitably Social (PDF) – he provides some reasons why FMCG brands have an issue with social media:

“(FMCG’s have) relatively low brand resonance compared to some other types of branded products and services. This is partially a function of price (since low price generally equals low involvement), as well as ubiquity breeding apathy.”

I’m not convinced by those arguments. Google and Twitter are both free, available everywhere and great brands. But they are remarkable: they provide a fantastic product that is hard for others to replicate.

As we know, advertising is for those that don’t have a remarkable product. Does this mean FMCG brands should stick to advertising and forgo social?

Hell No.

The gold standard of awareness creation via social media was for an FMCG brand – the Old Spice Guy campaign. And it beats many standard advertising campaigns hands down for results.

I mean, it almost immediately lifted sales!

Here is a good summary of the campaign and its results, but to sum it up – Old Spice marketed to an audience with an audience creatively on a grand scale.

Ah, but I hear you say: the Old Spice Guy never spoke about Old Spice. The link with the brand was ‘merely’ an emotional connection.

True. But if you are going to play to the product’s strengths of an FMCG brand, you better be sure that they really are remarkable. Else you need to go the creative, emotional and less product-y way.

One avenue is to engage key influencers in a remarkable way like Old Spice did.

But hang on a minute. What about this sharing fad? Sharing is so now! Ergo.. Can’t I make people share stuff under the banner of my brand?

We’ll deal with the sharing ‘fad’ and whether your brand can get people to share stuff in a next post.

RAAK’s top list of FMCG brand’s campaigns on social media:

1. Old Spice – by a country mile.
2. Whopper friend sacrifice – very creative use of social media AND directly related to the brand!
3. Skittles – much maligned in the marketing community but very good value for money awareness creation none the less.

The GAP had passionate fans

In preparation for our soon to launch logo experiment RAAK asked brand meister Wybe Magermans of WMH to give us his thoughts on Gap’s recent logo fiasco.

As often in life and marketing, it is not what you do, but how you do it. This also seems to be the case with Gap and their debacle that has been unfolding on and offline over the past weeks. For anyone who either doesn’t care about Gap or logos, GAP had to retract their newly designed identity after thousands of ‘customers’ complained about it in various forums, blogs, Facebook groups, etc.

Was it the logo design itself, the way it was launched or how Gap dealt with the online onslaught that could be up for ‘worse marketing moment 2010 award’?

I will not discuss if the design of the new logo was indeed a ‘good piece of design’. Too many people have done so already, but I am sure it wouldn’t have won any awards for innovative and engaging design. Yes, people get precious about logos, but people also are fickle and forgetful. Although it will never become UK’s most loved identity, the 2012 Olympic logo for London will also not temper Londoner’s enthusiasm for the Games.

It was surely the way how Marka Hansen, Gap’s president for North America, launched and retracted the logo that lacked every sense of confidence or conviction. Even yielding to her ‘passionate customers’ days after the launch by asking for their logo ideas, before a total surrender a week later.

Marka however shouldn’t feel too embarrassed though, as she has joined an established (and growing) ensemble of badly executed rebrands, from Royal Mail to Tropicana.

The new identity could have worked if Gap would have truly believed it was the right thing to do. Did Gap actually need a new logo? If it did for reasons that only Gap would know, than the whole company and its identity launch communication should have spoken with more certitude.

I personally have only bought something at GAP once in my life and this was for my 3-year old nephew. I also have very little admiration for a brand that has as much character as Gordon Brown sitting in a silver Vauxhall Astra drinking tap water. Yet even people I know who are Gap fans say that it isn’t the brand anymore that it used to be in the Sarah Jessica Parker campaign days. If the marketing department at Gap thought it needed a new logo, it was possibly because of that. Are they losing relevance and the connection with people; and would a new identity have solved this problem?

A funny take on corporate logo design

Gap’s marketing department should know that their brand is not just their logo. Just like an ad campaign is not a brand. And if you think it is, then you will end up with the likes as FCUK. Any agency, marketing consultant or brand blogger will tell you that a brand in 21st century is much more expansive. A solid brand survives attacks to a particular equity of their brand, as they will have a host of other equities that will overcome this.

Get your product right (Apple), get your story right (Ben & Jerry’s) and get your tone right (Your M&S). If Gap had these ducks in a row, then a badly redesigned logo wouldn’t have created so much uproar. People will always find a reason to moan, but we are also forgiving when brands get other things right.

Crowdsourcing is a reality that won’t go away just yet and instinctively we’ve always leant towards to the first group, but divisive issues need to be tried and tested.
We already used crowdsourcing techniques very succesfully in our RAAK logo experiment, but that project was of course of a more personal, a more creative nature.
So when we got the chance to apply the concept on a commercial project, with a real client, we jumped at it.
And this is what we learnt.

The job was to design a website and a brand identity for a start-up consultancy agency called Consultifi. Because of our plug-in model, we don’t work with in-house designers and normally we would tap into our network and instruct the most suitable designer for the job. But this time we decided use the Crowdspring service, boasting more than 45,000 designers.

After a good 10 days, we ended up with no less than 218 entries. Some of them were variants on the same theme or re-workings, but we did have about 120 unique designs. Not bad for an unglamorous, serious business consultancy company.
The client was happy and we thought it was quite a success, so below are a few things we learnt from our experience.

* Consider paying more
We analysed the mean and average of the budgets of similar concepts. We decided to stretch our budget a bit. Because by doing so, we would sit in the top 5 of ‘logo and stationery’ projects and not amongst those other $500 briefs.
Also, we do believe in the motto “you get what you pay for”, so by increasing the amount we were hoping to reach out to better designers. Crowdspring says their stats confirm that: the more you pay, the more entries you get.
But of course, more doesn’t necessarily mean better.

* Include things you don’t want in your brief
Saying that the brief is important is stating the obvious, but I was surprised to find how few people include what they don’t want.
Creatives will only send in a design if they think they have a chance of winning. Remember: they see this as a competition. They’re up against 45,000 other designers. So the more doubts you can take away from them, the more likely it is they will have a shot at your brief. If you don’t want black-and-white, spell it out from the start. If you don’t want capital letters, tell them.
The brief for a boring immigration law job did just that and despite the relatively low budget, they got over 200 entries.

But won’t that close off certain routes, I hear you think? Nah.
Even though we briefed the creatives to create a logotype and ignore a non-text logo, some of them still sent one in. And even though we asked them to avoid the word ‘consultifi’ in all lowercase, some still used it.
If creatives feel strong about their idea, they will go off-brief. I’ve experienced this with music video directors, with graphic designers,…: if they think it works, they will try and convince you.
In this project, one of the designers even wrote a long email about why he thought we were wrong.
You can’t always predict what will work and what not, so we did consider some of these entries.

* Set aside enough time for feedback
On that immigration law job I mentioned above, the client also gave lots of feedback on each design. Another a reason of the quality of their entries, I think.
Crowdspring recommends you give ratings. One, because it’s only fair to the designers and two, because it will improve the designs. Other designers go and read your feedback on other entries and learn what you want and -again- what you don’t want.
As a comparison: a more creative, exciting project (for a media agency) with a similar budget only got 60-odd entries. But they did stop rating and giving feedback after a few days.

I found the rating system quite hard to manage, because a 3-star rating in the beginning might only have been a 2-star later on, once we got better entries.
But the feedback opportunity is very useful. It does give you the chance to finetune designs directly with creatives. And it does make the process more human.

* Don’t end your project on a Monday
Simply because there’s a chance you will receive a massive amount of entries in the last few days. In our case, a good 40% of the entries only came through in the last day. Not sure if this is because creatives fear being copied or simply because deadlines are there to be pushed.
But it does leave you with little time for feedback. Especially if those last days are a Saturday and Sunday and you don’t want to spend that time rating almost 100 designs.

* Be prepared to make quick decisions at the end
Especially if you work for a client. We sort of missed that you’re meant to make a decision within 7 days. And we hadn’t anticipated our client going on holiday. We were open about it and told the creatives, but then realised Crowdspring’s terms state that they have the right to chose a winner on your behalf if you take too long. Admittedly, when we contacted them, they got back to us really quickly, assuring us that we were doing the right things. So I’m not sure if they ever apply that power.
From a functionality point of view, Crowdspring could make the decision-step a little bit easier by adding a shortlist functionality. That way you can compare all your ‘shortlisted’ designs on one page; and share that page with your client.

* Buy the URL from the company you’re working for
A lesson we learnt the hard way. While we were running the project, someone bought the dot-com and dot-net urls for the company and then tried to sell it to us.

Is the Consultifi identity the best logo since the Swoosh? Probably not.
Will we use it again? Probably, yes.
Is it a replacement for design agencies? I doubt it very much. I would think that developing a brand identity that really makes a difference does benefit from a more traditional, in-depth (and thus more expensive) approach.
But it does offer a good opportunity for smaller companies or start-ups, who get the chance of getting a very decent design done for a very decent price.
And for creatives from all over the world (our ‘winner’ alexe is from Romania) to be exposed to briefs.

So it’s definitely a force to be reckoned with.

Yesterday however, the importance and role of experiential marketing hit home to me.

Everything we do, we do within a framework of our understanding of how digital media has opened up the media landscape to everyone. One of the obvious conclusions for some time now is that word-of-mouth marketing and therefore by extension, product, is key. This is especially true online. Google beat Yahoo!, Altavista and Lycos to be top dog because of their product, despite their competitors’ massive marketing spend.

It turns out that this principle holds true in a wider sense as well. We recently met Jonathan Baskin, ex-brand manager and author of Branding only works on Cattle. He argues that even brands like Nike were first built around superior product before anything else. Digital media just throws this truth in much sharper relief.

Anyway, Gerrie and I were in Brussels yesterday where we dropped in at Demonstrate (their website does not do them justice) under recommendation of Stefaan, copywriter and blogger behind Knotoryus. Demonstrate is one of the largest experiental marketing ‘agencies’ in Europe.

They occupy a huge warehouse on the northern outskirts of Brussels. One part of which is just that, an area called The Platform that’s full of props, toys and gadgets – the tools of their trade. Half a football field of the stuff. I kid you not.

And then there is a creative hub, off to the side, where strategy, account management and the creatives reside.

But what we found truly interesting was the chat with Kate Stockman, Demonstrate’s creative director.

Kate speaks fast. No need for her to ponder or um and ah, because she’s been there and done it.

“We don’t do PR stunts for PR stunt’s sake. Publicity is not why we plan an event or an action. We plan it around customer experience. “

If it generates publicity, it is not an unwelcome by-product, she ads. But it’s not the aim. The aim is to get the customer to try the product. If it’s a drink, get them to taste it. Simple.

Or it could be added value. She explains how they rigged a mobile bar where punters could learn how to pull the perfect pint.

On the web all the talk is about how to move away from advertising to product or if not that to content, i.e. offer some real value and sponsor it. Is this not exactly what Demonstrate is doing in the streets?

Also consider this. Online, music and video are ubiquitous. It’s easy to copy information and content. Being there -  the live experience – will become more important and not less.

Why?!?

We had a challenge, you see.
We needed to get RAAK up and running as soon as possible. After we finished our inaugural CanEUhearme project, we had new jobs coming in. And jobs require setting up a proper company. And proper companies require a proper logo.
But we couldn’t wait a few weeks/months on developing a full brand identity and spend lots of time (and money) on a full website design. We needed to get going now. So we decided to get a little creative.
Rather than tap into our network of designers or crowd-source amongst the design community (like BBH Labs did when they started up), we decided to go one step further. We would plug into the crowds big-time.

How did we do it?
Inspired by Aaron Koblin’s Sheep Market project, we got interested in experimenting with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in some shape or form. For those who don’t know Mechanical Turk: it’s a website where ‘Requesters’ post little tasks that are more suitable to be done by humans rather than by a computer. ‘Workers’ from all over the world then choose and execute these jobs at the fee the Requester is prepared to pay. Typical tasks range from doing online surveys to transcribing a little audio excerpt. Generally quite mundane stuff.

For this logo experiment we posted a task on MT, asking ‘Workers’ to design one letter: an R, an A or a K. Just one. We’d pay 1 dollar. Which, we found out, is not a bad amount of money on Mechanical Turk. And we didn’t tell the Workers what this was for.

The first letter, a cute little ‘A’, came in a mere 15 minutes after we published the task. We were shocked and exhilarated. 4 hours later, we had our 40 letters. Not one of the ‘designers’ asked us what this was about.
The designs ranged from the ridiculous to the cute. From the blatantly opportunistic to the not-that-bad. 10 were not usable for copyright, technical,… reasons.

[View with PicLens]

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More questions
Is this a diss at designers? That they’re all useless? Not at all.
Is it meant to start a discussion about the relevance of brand identity? And the validity of an all-encompassing, everlasting logo? Sure, go ahead.
Is it ugly? From a design point of view, quite possibly. But that’s not really the point. Put these designs next to each other, add the element of randomness and you have a crowd-sourced, ever-changing mash-up of a logo, designed by 30 non-designers. How beautiful is that?

But above all, it’s our little ode to creative problem solving.
As everybody is talking about new ways of collaborative thinking, social media and crowd-sourcing, this was a good moment to experiment with the concept.
Also, as a new company, we’d like to be known for turning theory into practice in a creative way. And this was the most practical creative solution to get a relevant logo.

Anyway, we have another 10 dollars left on our Mechanical Turk account, so if you’re a ‘designer’ and would like to take part in this experiment, email us your R, A or K. Once we have 10 designs we like (we’re gonna be more strict now), we’ll set up a new Mechanical Turk task and tell you how to claim your dollar.

After that we’ll try and make a Mechanical Turk version of our ‘mechanical musical logo’, which you can admire in our little video. If you feel inspired, let us know.