Metropol

steddenm wrote:Millie's Cookies have also changed their logo to...

That's been around for at least two years in some places. The Westfield store opened with that identity in 2008.

Mattarz wrote:

steddenm wrote:Millie's Cookies have also changed their logo to...

That's been around for at least two years in some places. The Westfield store opened with that identity in 2008.

Indeed, Touchwood Solihull and the Bullring had that since about 2008, although, New Street station and Palisades has the old one.

It seems The Brit Awards have ditched their usual logo for something a bit different. Not all bad though.

Mattarz wrote:

steddenm wrote:Millie's Cookies have also changed their logo to...

That's been around for at least two years in some places. The Westfield store opened with that identity in 2008.

Rather worrying that I've been to the Westfield Millie's Cookies on more than one occasion and not noticed that branding at all. Perhaps that's a good example of me being incredibly unobservant, but as I work in branding, I tend to notice even the minutiae of branding most of the time, so I'm surprised that I totally failed to pick up on that. Either I'm losing my touch, or the Millie's Cookies brand just doesn't stand out in any meaningful way in the visual noise of a shopping centre or high street.

Not so much a 'high street rebrand', but back in November, as part of a broader change to officially introduce their "Be what's next" tagline (replacing "Your potential. Our passion."), Microsoft introduced a subtly tweaked logo:


Credit: Microsoft logo graphic from article at I Started Something

That was one occasion where I did notice that something was different (the 'c' and 'o' looked wrong somehow), but the changes were so small that I assumed it was just a poor rendering of the real thing. I'm generally not against the principle of this kind of very small tweaking to keep things fresh, but when the details are so minute, and the totality remains so unremarkable, I struggle to see the point in this sort of turd-polishing.

It's not that the Microsoft logo is 'ugly', or that it desperately needs a wholesale transformation into some all-lower case type with a random blob caked in gradients and shading details, but there's nothing particularly attractive or memorable about it. Even an update to use the company's own corporate font, Segoe - rather than sticking to the Franklin Gothic logo, which must surely be two decades old now? - would have been a welcome change.

Dell did a good job of micro-tweaking and updating their logo, at around the same time that Microsoft was working on theirs. In Dell's case, it was the same kind of minutiae that were meticulously adjusted and reworked, but Dell has a good case for preserving the majority of its logo in tact, through the use of the angled 'E' icon that forms part of the wordmark, whereas the weird cut-out in the Microsoft logo that creates a pseudo-ligature with the 'o' and 's' just doesn't have the uniqueness or distinction that the Dell logo has.

For anyone interested, Brand New did a good write-up on the changes Dell made to its brand system in November.

Microsoft is one of those strange cases where their products (notably Windows, Office and Xbox) have a far stronger identity than the Microsoft brand alone.

Indeed, the problem is that Microsoft tends to be viewed as a commodity brand - where purchases are made out of necessity or habit, or where interactions are coincidental rather than deliberate, such as using Windows computers at work - rather than an aspirational brand, as Apple is.

That said, Windows 7 has probably been the most successful product so far to make an emotional connection with consumers, thanks in no small part to the "Windows 7 was my idea" campaign - but the success of that campaign only underlines the fact that, as WillPS suggests, Microsoft marketing tends to be at its most successful when the Microsoft brand itself is nowhere to be seen.

Windows 7 marketing has been immensely successful, and of course the product itself is really very good; Xbox has gone from strength to strength, and even these days, I find myself meeting people who are genuinely surprised that Xbox is a Microsoft venture.

There have been a couple of campaigns that I've enjoyed recently for Windows 7 and Windows Live: The Making Of A Song and The Future Of Technology.

BBC LDN wrote:The Future Of Technology.

Oh that's clever. I got a wee chill when I realised what was happening with the text going backwards.

I don't like the "Windows 7 was my idea", but that's down to the casting. They're not great at picking likeable faces - the boy in the Barcelona bar looks smug, and even the grandpa's voice on MSN Live sounds like he's being sarcastic.

Don't know quite how they manage to miss consistently on that part - they're neither constrained by budget nor location.

The other problem microsoft has is that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, or at least it seems that way. Songsmith http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E from a couple of years ago is a good example of this. In a market where Garageband is pretty well-regarded among hobbyists, why the hell did they try and sell this, let alone market it, as a standalone product? The technology is pretty cool, but they managed to throw any any credibility it might have brought with actual musician types (see 2 posts above) by not incorporating it into anything useful.

Sput wrote:The other problem microsoft has is that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, or at least it seems that way. Songsmith http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E from a couple of years ago is a good example of this. In a market where Garageband is pretty well-regarded among hobbyists, why the hell did they try and sell this, let alone market it, as a standalone product? The technology is pretty cool, but they managed to throw any any credibility it might have brought with actual musician types (see 2 posts above) by not incorporating it into anything useful.

Good grief! That ad is absolutely terrible. So, so cheesy, and doesn't really demonstrate how the technology actually works usefully either...

It was also a bad/good viral campaign. It has had the piss taken out of it mercilessly by people feeding the vocal tracks from classic hits into it and seeing what comes out...

Microsoft has been weirdly bad at bridging these logical divides of 'oh yeah, this app should talk to that service' especially up until the last couple of years. It's particularly odd as they've actually done fairly well over the last 5-10 years at managing that transition from monolithic OSs and productivity apps, towards the services side, but seemingly only in isolation. As a service Xbox LIVE is still incomparable in the console space, and Windows Live is basically just a cacophony of *stuff* but some of it is pretty well implemented.

Where they have monumentally failed is the integration and the overlap. The impression I got is that internally they seemed to be so competitive that working with third-parties was way easier than talking to a team in a different part of the building - but I'm sure that's not peculiar to MS at all. Take something dull like - hosted calendars. It's the kind of product you can target to home customers, small business, and enterprise in different ways. Whereas the logical solution is to essentially have a brute of a product, and for the inner concentric circles nerf it for 'lesser' audiences, instead Microsoft reinvents the wheel three times - releases a Windows Live Calendar, an Office 365 Calendar, and a SharePoint Calendar. No product is a subset of the other - the home product ends up integrating with services even the enterprise one doesn't, and there's no convenient migration path or communication. Then, shockingly enough, people end up needing bits of all three depending on whether they're at work or at home or whatever, so there's the insanity of using multiple products for the same thing...from one supplier. Eventually MS realise they're hemorrhaging money supporting the same product three times, so brutally slash the two worst-performing versions.

There's clearly been a huge improvement in recent years, and a lot of it seems to be the (ostensibly not very bold) strategy of targeting the 'three screens', which seemed to be a bit of a catalyst for tying together services to make this all a bit less clunky. I'm finding Windows Phone 7, obviously still in its infancy, to be a curious case study in this. It's the first time MS are trying to build in services integration into their operating system (curiously Windows itself continues to be pretty agnostic about the services side, even more-so since the fringe apps were pulled out of the Windows release-cycle and brought into the Windows Live umbrella, and the Xbox division reluctantly adopting Segoe in the dashboard seems to be about as bold a concession to the mothership as they're willing to make).

Except, for WP7, it's still just - messy. Going back to the calendar example - I use Outlook, and I use its calendar, and I just wanted to sync that with my phone. No. I have to use my Windows Live account to sign into the Windows Live Calendar website (which was hidden behind Hotmail, which I don't use) and then add a specific calendar to my Outlook list, then migrate everything from my existing calendar to this new one, which eventually appeared as syncable on my phone. Even if technically these are the hoops being jumped through, that's fine, but as a user I have one MS product with a calendar, and another MS product with a calendar, both advertising their ability to synchronise, and that's the really boring thing I wanted to achieve - even if this is the nonsense happening behind it, I want to be abstracted from that.

There's an interesting article by Paul Thurrott (who I generally find irritating, but he's a bit easier to take when he's just restating fact, but can't find the link at the moment...) which outlined the range of scenarios for syncing Office content with WP7 and Windows Live, and SharePoint, and Office 365, and SkyDrive each with their own limitations and idiosyncrasies. If we were talking about tying into as many third-party services as possible, then it's a given that there will be subtle differences - but when it's four services from the same company with absolutely no consistency or clarity, it just seems awkward and lazy, and makes it even harder to find their push into the cloud credible.

They're definitely closer than ever, even though they seem to be finding it much easier to integrate services and branding on the entertainment side rather than in productivity (even if that does lead to curious artifacts like prominent 'Xbox LIVE' branding on what is not an Xbox...)