Life

Consistency is dull

I’m rereading David Aaker’s excellent book, Building Strong Brands and in chapter 7 he goes over changing a […]

I’m rereading David Aaker’s excellent book, Building Strong Brands and in chapter 7 he goes over changing a brand, and the reasons why. He then counters them all saying that consistency is usually the best course (he’s not that didactic: he mentions KFC’s need to distance themselves from fried food. Hmm. Did that work?)

I had my aha of recognition when he mentioned this scenario: a brand manager is asked in a meeting with senior types what is he going to do about the fact that the brand has been flat the last three quarters. Will he

a) Say: I’m going to do the same thing as the last three managers?
b) Say: I have an exciting new plan to reinvent our brand!

The temptation for action is powerful, whether the change is needed or not.

So it goes with redesigns as well– it’s not the users who are bored with the design, it’s not the users who are bored with the brand, it’s the employees. And they decide on change.

The second whammy was my realization that most people determine that they are going to change before they realize how they are going to change.

This means companies have committed to change before they have determined if the change makes things better or worse. Then, six months down the line, millions of bucks in the hole, who is going to be the brave one who says “This is going to make things worse. Let’s not do it.” The same guy who said “I’ve got an exciting new plan?”

Of course there are may ways to avoid this trap: going in ready to get out, prototyping, testing with user groups, shorter change cycles, regular checkpoints to decide go/no go. But think of the last redesign you saw. Wasn’t more like “We’re doing a redesign AHHRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHAAAAAHHH” (my berserker imitation, excuse me).

At times like this I think of poor Levis, floundering to try to make themselves more relevent than the 501. All they did was weaken their claim to reliable comfortable real jeans, and take their changes with the piranhas of change: the fashionable set.

We, the ones who look at our site, our brand, our product ever day, we are the deadly ones. What our customers call comfort we call dull. We’re like a bored teenager that dies her hair blue over a long weekend. We must curb that energy, and point it toward extention and growth with care, rather than reinvention.

9 Comments

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  1. 1
    Jonathan

    I think you’re right as far as your argument goes (change for change’s sake is bad) but there are other things that complicate the picture. For instance, the fact that sites have to be redesigned if the parent brand re-positions for whatever reason (takeover, merger, etc.). Also, what if brand values dictate that the design *should* change/evolve/respond? Technology businesses come to mind, as do FMCG. Site designs rarely exist in isloation as you seem to suggest.

  2. 2
    Joshua Porter

    Your comment that what we call dull our customers call comfort seems dead on.

    Gerry McGovern says that love is as much an act of habit as it is anything else.

    Are there any companies that have truly reinvented themselves while holding onto the same customer base? I wonder…

  3. 3
    christina

    Aaker goes on to tell of a case study– Miller Lite had built up a strong brand with their “Tastes great, less filling” ads featuring retired athletes. When they started to loose younger (heavy) beer drinkers to bud and coors lite, they changed their brand to “It’s it and that’s that” capitalizing on the fact that they were the first Lite brand. The lost significantly more share with this change. He ponders what if they stayed with the message tastes great, less filling but changed the setting from retired athletes in a bar to young guys playing volleyball. In other words, what if they evolved rather than reinvented.

  4. 4
    Information Management Weblog

    Consistency

    Here’s a couple of nice posts from Christina Wodke on brand consistency. A quote: We, the ones who look at our site, our brand, our product ever day, we are the deadly ones. What our customers call comfort we call dull. We’re like a bored teenager that…

  6. 6
    christina

    Yeah, i know… but we at B&A are stuck now— we have got to move to a new CMS, as Movabletype does not do nearly enough of what we need it to. The IA is too cumbersome, and we’ve got too many articles to keep it as it is. Plus the design is ready for a refresh for the purpose of both improving usability and attracting a more designerly audience. So I think we have enough reasons to go to a new look. Plus it’s a magazine, which is expected to be a bit more timely in its look/feel. But we’ll see– i hope we don’t break anything.

  7. 7
    Alberto

    Suggest to them to add a section for unsual articles then; that is, occasional longer articles, or about unsual scripting or programming topics/problems.

    I had an incredible amount of problems in making webzines even understand _why_ a topic like “unfolding a matrix with an irregular pattern” might be a topic with an “upshot”.

    [0]=[]
    [0][0]=[]
    [0][0][0]=hi
    [0][0][1]=how
    [0][1]=are
    [0][2]=[]//empty set
    [1]=[]
    [1][0]=you
    [1][1][0]=[]
    [1][1][0][0]=today?

    Unfold= scan(array)
    returns:
    hi how are you today?

    Where could such irregularly structured data be found?

    They seem to assume it’s rare – we work with it everyday: computer folders are nested like that, html or DOM nodes are like that: deeply nested collections of nodes written down without having a pattern in mind, and yet whose edges (or paths!) you may want to know in a synoptical way.

    This is something that no webzines contacted thus far seems to understand.
    A web zine needs agility, but it shouldn’t be detrimental to it allowing also for the “unusual”; they might even end up finding that some readers might like it.

    ciao!
    Alberto

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