A rebrand should be done with consultation, and that should be factored in to any decision-making. In the 2010s, it should consider out-of-the-box suggestions, especially in an increasingly cluttered market-place. It should be launched internally first, then externally. A new logo would surface after months of exhaustive design work. The result should be something distinctive and meaningful that resonates with all audiences.
Meanwhile, hereâs one done by my Alma Mater amongst false claims, poor analyses, and considerable opposition, with the resulting logo appearing a mere week after the powers-that-be voted to ignore the feedback. In branding circles, any professional will tell you that there’s no way a logo can appear that quicklyâunless, of course, Victoria University of Wellington had no inclination to listen to any of its audiences during its “feedback” process. But then, maybe this was done in a hurry:
The result is flawed and lacks quality. Without even getting into the symbol or the typography, the hurried nature of this design is evident with the margin: the text is neither optically nor mathematically aligned, and accurately reflects the lack of consideration that this rebrand has followed. The one symbol I like, the ceremonial crest, does away with the type, and judging from the above, it’s just as well.
I like change, and my businesses have thrived on it. But this left much to be desired from the moment we got wind of it. It supplants a name sourced from Queen Victoria with the name of an even older, white, male historical figure, creates confusion with at least three universities that share its initials if it is to be abbreviated UoW (Woollongong, Wah, Winchester; meanwhile the University of Washington is UW), and offers little by way of differentiation.
Yes, there are other Victoria Universities out there. To me thatâs a case of sticking with the name and marketing it more cleverly to be the dominant oneâand forcing others to retrench. Where did the Kiwi desire to be number one go? Actually, how bad was the confusion, as, on the evidence, Iâm unconvinced.
If itâs about attracting foreign students, then alumnus Callum Osborneâs suggestion of Victoria University of New Zealand is one example to trade on the nation brand, which rates highly.
There were many ways this could have gone, and at each turn amateurism and defeatism appeared, at least to my eyes, to be the themes. #UnWell
A letter I penned today to Prof Grant Guilford, Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University of Wellington. I support the official adoption of a Māori name (I thought it had one?) but removing Victoria is daft, for numerous reasons, not least the University’s flawed research, dealt with elsewhere.
Wellington, August 8, 2018
Prof Grant Guilford
Vice-Chancellor Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600
Wellington 6011
New Zealand
Dear Prof Guilford:
Re. Name change for Victoria University of Wellington
There have been many arguments against why Victoria University of Wellington should change its name. Count me in as endorsing the views of Mr Geoff McLay, whose feedback the University has already received.
To his comments, I would like to add several more.
First, since I graduated from Vic for the fourth time in 2000, brandingâa subject I have an above-average knowledge of, being the co-chair of the Swedish think tank Medinge Group and with books and academic articles to my nameâhas become a more bottom-up affair. In lay terms, all successful brands need their communityâs support to thrive. Not engaging that community properly, and putting forth unconvincing arguments for change when asked, fails âBranding 101â by todayâs standards. I donât believe those of us favouring the status quo are a minority. Weâre simply the ones who have engaged with the University.
As an alumnus, I have a great deal of pride in âVicâ, so much so that I have returned to support many of its programmes, namely Alumni as Mentors and the BA Internships. The Universityâs view of market-place confusion is, to my mind, a defeatist position, one which says, âOh, thereâs confusion, so letâs cede our position to the others who lay claim to âVictoriaâ.â Thatâs not the attitude that I have toward our fine university.
The alternative is to stand firm and build the brand on a global scale, something that is more than possible if the University were to adopt some lessons from international marketing and branding.
I have done it numerous times professionally, and for New Zealand companies with strictly limited budgets, and the University has an enviable and proud network of alumni who, I suspect, are willing to help.
Vic has told us for years it is âworld-classâ, and I expect it to stand by those claimsâincluding confidence in its own name, not unlike the great universities in the US and UK. A lot of it is in the way the brand is positioned. Confidence goes a long way, including confidence in saying, âThis is the real Victoria.â
Kiwis are adept at being more authentic, something which a strong branding campaign would highlight.
As alumnus, and fellow St Markâs old boy, Callum Osborne notes, if there is to be a geographic qualifier, New Zealand has far more brand equity than Wellington, so if a change is to occur, then âVictoria University of New Zealandâ is an appropriate way forward.
âUniversity of Wellingtonâ says little, and there are Wellingtons elsewhere, too.
This isnât about apeing others, but being so distinct in the way the University communicates, symbolizes and differentiates itself to all of its audiences. To be fair, I have only seen pockets of that since graduating, yet I believe it is possible, and it can be unlocked.
Facebookâs woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even after users have opted out, as I have proved on more than one occasion on this blog. They donât care what your preferences are, and for a long time changed them quietly when you werenât looking.
And itâs nothing new: in October 2010, Emily Steel wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, about a data firm called Rapleaf that harvested Facebook information to target political advertisements (hat tip here to Jack Martin Leith).
Facebook knew of a data breach years ago and failed to report it as required under law. The firm never acts, as we have seen, when everyday people complain. It only acts when it faces potential bad press, such as finally ceasing, after nearly five years, its forced malware downloads after I tipped off Wiredâs Louise Matsakis about them earlier this year. Soon after Louiseâs article went live, the malware downloads ceased.
Like all these problems, if the stick isnât big enough, Facebook will just hope things go away, or complain, as it did today, that itâs the victim. Sorry, youâre not. Youâve been complicit more than once, and violating user privacy, as I have charged on this blog many times, is part of your business practice.
In this environment, I am also not surprised that US$37,000 million has been wiped off Facebookâs value and CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth decline by US$5,000 million.
Those who kept buying Facebook shares, I would argue, were unreasonably optimistic. The writing surely was on the wall in January at the very latest (though I would have said it was much earlier myself), when I wrote, âAll these things should have been sending signals to the investor community a long time ago, and as weâve discussed at Medinge Group for many years, companies would be more accurately valued if we examined their contribution to humanity, and measuring the ingredients of branding and relationships with people. Sooner or later, the truth will out, and finance will follow what brand already knew. Facebookâs record on this front, especially when you consider how we at Medinge value brands and a companyâs promise-keeping, has been astonishingly poor. People do not trust Facebook, and in my book: no trust means poor brand equity.â
This sounds like my going back to my very first Medinge meeting in 2002, when we concluded, at the end of the conference, three simple words: âFinance is broken.â Itâs not a useful measure of a company, certainly not the human relationships that exist within. But brand has been giving us this heads-up for a long time: if you canât trust a company, then it follows that its brand equity is reduced. That means its overall value is reduced. And time after time, finance follows what brand already knew. Even those who tolerate dishonestyâand millions doâwill find it easy to depart from a product or service along with the rest of the mob. Thereâs less and less for them to justify staying with it. The reasons get worn down one by one: Iâm here because of my kidsâtill the kids depart; Iâm here because of my friendsâtill the friends depart. If you don’t create transparency, you risk someone knocking back the wall.
We always knew Facebookâs user numbers were bogus, considering how many bots there are on the system. It would be more when people wanted to buy advertising, and it would be less when US government panels charged with investigating Facebook were asking awkward questions. I would love to know how many people are really on there, and the truth probably lies between the two extremes. Facebook probably should revise its claimed numbers down by 50 per cent.
Itâs a very simplified analysisâof course brand equity is made up of far more than trustâand doubters will point to the fact Facebookâs stock had been rising through 2017.
But, as I said, finance follows brand, and Facebook is fairly under assault from many quarters. It has ignored many problems for over a decade, its culture borne of arrogance, and you can only do this for so long before people wise up. In the Trump era, with the US ever more divided, there were political forces that even Facebook could not ignore. Zuckerberg wonât be poor, and Facebook, Inc. has plenty of assets, so theyâre not going away. But Facebook, as we know it, isnât the darling that it was a decade ago, and what we are seeing, and what I have been talking about for years, are just the tip of the iceberg.
I’m getting a buzz seeing how little I update social media now. Around February 2016 I began updating Tumblr far less; I’ve gone from dozens of posts per month to four in December 2017 and seven in January 2018. (Here’s my Tumblr archive.) Facebook, as many of you know, is a thing of the past for me (as far as my personal wall is concerned), though that was helped along by Facebook itself. However, I’m still a pretty heavy Instagram user, and I continue to Tweetâthough with Twitter’s analytics telling you how much you’re up or down over the previous month, it might be a challenge to see if I can get that down by 100 per cent next. (It won’t happen any time soon, but if Twitter continues on its current path over its policies, it might come sooner rather than later.)
I’m wondering if the next badge of honour is how much you can de-socialize yourself, and for those of us with web presences (such as this blog), bringing traffic to your own spaces. Why? It’s all about credibility and authenticity. And I’m not sure if the fleeting nature of social media provides them, at least not for me.
Now in an age where so many are trying to be an “influencer”, then wouldn’t we expect the tide to turn against the shallow, fleeting posters in favour of something deeper and more considered? After all, marketing seeks authenticityâit has for a long time. What is authentic about a social media influencer who changes clothes multiple times a day out of obligation to sponsors? Even if they reach millions, did it really connect with audiences on a deeper level or did it simply seem forced?
I can understand how, initially, social media were real connectors, allowing people to connect one on one and have a conversation. It seemed logical that marketing would head that way, going from one-to-many, to something more personalized, then (as Stefan Engeseth has posited for a long time) to one where brand and audience were on the same side, trying to find shared values (let’s call it ‘oneness’). At a time social media looked like it would help things along. But has it really? Influencers are less interested in being on the same side than being on the other side, in an adaptation of the one-to-many model. It’s just that that model itself has become democratized, so a single person has the means of reaching millions without a traditional intermediary (e.g. the media). There’s nothing really wrong with that, as long as we see it for what it is: a communications’ channel. Nothing new there.
Some are doing it right in pursuing oneness with their audiences by posting just on a single topic, updating honestly about their everyday livesâmy good friend Summer Rayne Oakes comes to mind with her Homestead Brooklyn account, and has stayed on-message with what she stands for and her message for over a decade. Within the world of Instagram, this is a “deeper” level, sharing values in an effort to connect and be on the same side as her audience. However, she isn’t solely using Instagram; other media back her up. Hers is a fantastic example of how to market and influence in the context I’m describing, so there is still a point to these social media services. But for every Summer Rayne there are many, many who are gathering attention for no values that I can fathomâit has all been about the numbers of followers and looking attractive.
I haven’t a problem with their choiceâit is their space, after allâbut we shouldn’t pretend that these are media that have allowed more authentic conversations to take place. Marketers should know this. These messages aren’t customized or personalized. Algorithms will rank them so audiences get a positive hit that their own preferences are being validated, just like any internet medium that places us in bubbles. The authenticity is relative: because no party has come between the communicator and the audience, then it’s unfiltered, and in that respect it’s first-hand versus second-hand. But how many times was that message rehearsed? How many photos were taken before that one was selected? It’s “unreality”.
There are so many such social media presences now, and crowded media are not places where people can have a decent connection with audiences. Some with millions of usersâI’m thinking of young modelsâmight not even be reaching the target audience that companies expected of them. Is what they wear really going to be relevant to someone of the opposite sex browsing for eye candy? That isn’t a genuine conversation.
Don’t look to my Instagram for any clues, eitherâI use it for leisure and not for marketing. I don’t have the ambition of being a social media influencer: I’m happy with what I do have to get my viewpoints across.
And I don’t know what’s next. I see social media decentralizing and people taking charge of their privacy more, even if most people are happy to have the authorities snoop on their conversations. Mastodon has been pretty good so far, because it hasn’t attracted everyone. The few who are there are having respectful conversations, even if posts aren’t reaching the numbers they might on Twitter, and mutual respect can lead to authenticity. If, as a marketer, that’s not what you seek, that’s fine: there are plenty of accounts operating on audience numbers but not genuine conversationsâas long as you know what you’re getting into. But I believe marketing, and in particular branding, should form real relationships and dialogue. Not every life is the fantasy shown in social mediaâwe know that that’s not possible. One politician has coined the term ‘fake news’; and social media have “fake lives”, in amongst all the bots.
If these media become known for shallow connections “by the numbers”, then even those doing it right, forming those genuine conversations, may be compelled to move on, or at least value the social media services less because of what their brands stand for. Email is a great medium still, and you can still have great conversations on it, but email marketing isn’t as “sexy” as it was in the mid-1990s, because there’s more spam than legit messages. It takes skill to use it well and to build up a proper, consented email list. Social media are getting to a point where some big-number accounts are associated with shallowness, and the companies themselves (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) have policies and conduct that have the potential to taint our own brands.
In 2018, as at any other time, doing something well takes hard work. There is no magic medium.
Mark Zuckerbergâs promise to fix Facebook in 2018 is, in my opinion, too little, too late.
However, since I ceased updating my Facebook profile last month, Iâve come across many people who tell me the only reason they stay on it is to keep in touch with family and friends, so Zuckerbergâs intention to refocus his site on that is the right thing to do. Heâs also right to admit that Facebook has made âerrors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools.â
Interestingly, Facebookâs stock has fallen since his announcement, wiping milliards off Zuckerbergâs own fortune. Investors are likely nervous that this refocusing will hurt brands who pay to advertise on the platform, who might now reconsider using it. Itâs a decidedly short-term outlook based on short-term memory, but thatâs Wall Street for you. Come to think of it, thatâs humanity for you.
But letâs look at this a bit more dispassionately. Despite my no longer updating Facebook, Iâm continuing to get a lot of friend requests. And those requests are coming from bots. Facebook hasnât fixed its bot problemâfar from it. This reached epidemic levels in 2014, and itâs continued in 2018âfour years and one US presidential election later. As discussed earlier on this blog, Facebook has been found to have lied about user numbers: it claims more people in certain demographics than there are people. If its stock was to fall, that should have done it. But nothing happened: investors are keen to maintain delusions if it helps their interests. But it needs to be fixed.
If Zuckerberg is sincere, Facebook also needs to fix its endless databasing issues and to come clean on its bogus malware warnings, forcing people to download âscannersâ that are hidden on their computers. This should have hit the tech media but no one seems to have the guts to report on it. Thatâs not a huge deal, I suppose, since it has meant tens of thousands have come to my blog instead, but again, that was a big red flag that, if reported, should have had investors worried. And that needs to be fixed.
Others Iâve discussed this with inform me that Facebook needs to do a far better job of removing porn, including kiddie porn, and if it werenât for a lot of pressure, it tends to leave bullying and sexist comments up as well.
All these things should have been sending signals to the investor community a long time ago, and as weâve discussed at Medinge Group for many years, companies would be more accurately valued if we examined their contribution to humanity, and measuring the ingredients of branding and relationships with people. Sooner or later, the truth will out, and finance will follow what brand already knew. Facebookâs record on this front, especially when you consider how we at Medinge value brands and a companyâs promise-keeping, has been astonishingly poor. People do not trust Facebook, and in my book: no trust means poor brand equity.
But the notion that businesses will suddenly desert Facebook is an interesting one to me, because, frankly, Facebook has been a lousy referrer of traffic, and has been for years. We have little financial incentive to remain on the site for some of our ventures.
Those of us with functioning memories will remember when Facebook killed the sharing from our fan pages by 90 per cent overnight some years ago. The aim was to get us to pay for sharing, and for many businesses, that worked.
But it meant users who wanted to hear from these brands no longer did, and I believe thatâs where the one of the first declines began.
People support brands for many reasons but Iâm willing to bet that their respective advertising budgets isnât one of them. They follow them for their values and what they represent. Or they follow them for their products and services. Those who couldnât afford to advertise, or opted to spend outside social media, lost a link with those users. And I believe users lost one of their reasons for remaining on Facebook, because their favourite brands were no longer showing up in their news feeds.
(Instagram, incidentally, has the opposite problem: thanks to Facebookâs suspect profiling, users are being bombarded with promotions from companies they are not fans of; Instagramâs claim that they rely on Facebookâs ad preferences, and Facebookâs claim that you can opt out of these, are also highly questionable. I get that people should be shown ads from companies they could become fans of; but why annoy them to this extent? Instagram also tracks the IP where you are surfing from, and ignores the geographical location you freely give either Instagram or Facebook for advertising purposes.)
What then surfaced in news feeds? Since Facebook became Digg, namely a repository of links (something I also said many years ago, long before the term âfake newsâ was coined), feeds became littered with news articles (real and bogus) and people began to be âbubbledâ, seeing things that supported their own world-views, because Facebookâs profiling sent those things to them. As T. S. Eliot once wrote, âNothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.â
This, as Facebook has discovered, was dangerous to democracy and entire groupsâpeople have died because of itâand thinking people questioned whether there was much value staying on the site.
From memory, and speaking for myself, Facebook probably had the balance of personal, brand and news right in 2010.
But I doubt that even if Facebook were to go back to something like the turn of the decade, it will entice me back. Itâs a thing of the past, something that might have been fun once, like Myspace. It didnât take long to wean me off that.
Even Zuckerberg notes that technology should decentralize and democratize, and that big tech has failed people on this front. I can foresee an attempt to decentralize Facebook, but with a caveat: theyâll want to continue gathering data on us as part of the deal. Itâll be an interesting gamble to take, unless it’s willing to give up its biggest asset: its claim to understanding individual profiles, even if many of its accounts aren’t human.
To me, the brand is tarnished. Every measure we have at Medinge Group suggests to me Facebook is a poor corporate citizen, and itâs going to take not just a turnaround in database stability or the enforcement of T&Cs, but a whole reconsideration of its raison dâĂȘtreto serve the masses. Honesty and transparency can save itâtwo things that I havenât seen Facebook exhibit much of in the 10-plus years I have used it.
Interesting to get this perspective on âBig Techâ from The Guardian, on how itâs become tempting to blame the big Silicon Valley players for some of the problems we have today. The angle Moira Weigel takes is that there needs to be more democracy in the system, where workers need to unite and respecting those who shape the technologies that are being used.
I want to add a few far simpler thoughts.
At the turn of the century, our branding profession was under assault from No Logo and others, showing that certain brands were not what they were cracked up to be. Medinge Group was formed in part because we, as practitioners, saw nothing wrong with branding per se, and that the tools could be used for good. Not everyone was Enron or Nike. There are Patagonia and Dilmah. That led to the original brand manifesto, on what branding should accomplish. (I was generously given credit for authoring this at one point, but I was simply the person who put the thoughts of my colleagues into eight points. In fact, we collectively gathered our ideas into eight groups, so I canât even take credit for the fact there are eight points.)
In 2017, we may look at Ăberâs sexism or Facebookâs willingness to accept and distribute malware-laden ads, and charge tech with damaging the fabric of society. Those who dislike President Trump in the US want someone to blame, and Facebookâs and Googleâs contributions to their election in 2016 are a matter of record. But itâs not that online advertising is a bad thing. Or that social media are bad things. The issue is that the players arenât socially responsible: none of them exist for any other purpose than to make their owners and shareholders rich, and the odd concession to not doing evil doesnât really make up for the list of misdeeds that these firms add to. Many of them have been recorded over the years on this very blog. Much of what we have been working toward at Medinge is showing that socially responsible organizations actually do better, because they find accord with their consumers, who want to do business or engage with those who share their values; and, as Nicholas Ind has been showing in his latest book, Branding Inside Out, these players are more harmonious internally. In the case of Stella McCartney, sticking to socially responsible values earns her brand a premiumâand sheâs one of the wealthiest fashion designers in the world.
I just canât see some of the big tech players acting the same way. Google doesnât pay much tax, for instance, and the misuse of Adwords aside, there are allegations that it hasnât done enough to combat child exploitation and it has not been a fair player when it comes to rewarding and acknowledging media outlets that break the news, instead siding with corporate media. Google may have open-source projects out there, but its behaviour is old-school corporatism these days, a far cry from its first five years when even I would have said they were one of the good guys.
Facebookâs problems are too numerous to list, though I attempted to do so here, but it can be summed up as: a company that will do nothing unless it faces embarrassment from enough people in a position of power. Weâve seen it tolerate kiddie porn and sexual harassment, giving both a âpassâ when reported.
Yet, for all that they make, it would be reasonable to expect that they put more people on the job in places where it mattered. The notion that three volunteers monitor complaints of child exploitation videos at YouTube is ridiculous but, for anyone who has complained about removing offensive content online, instantly believable; why there were not more is open to question. Anyone who has ventured on to a Google forum to complain about a Google product will also know that inaction is the norm there, unless you happen to get to someone senior and caring enough. Similarly, increasing resources toward monitoring advertising, and ensuring that complaints are properly dealt with would be helpful.
Googleâs failure to remove content mills from its News is contributing to âfake newsâ, yet its method of combatting that appears to be taking people away from legitimate media and ranking corporate players more highly.
None of these are the actions of companies that want to do right by netizens.
As Weigel notes, thereâs a cost to abandoning Facebook and Google. But equally there are opportunities if these firms cannot provide the sort of moral, socially responsible leadership modern audiences demand. In my opinion, they do not actually command brand loyaltyâa key ingredient of brand equityâif true alternatives existed. Duck Duck Go might only have a fraction of the traffic Google gets in search, but despite a good mission its results arenât always as good, and its search index is smaller. But we probably should look to it as a real alternative to search, knowing that our support can help it grow and attract more investment. There is room for a rival to Google News that allows legitimate media and takes reports of fake news sites more seriously. If social media are democratizingâand there are signs that they are, certainly with some of the writings by Doc Searls and Richard MacManusâthen there is room for people to form their own social networks that are decentralized, and where we hold the keys to our identity, able to take them wherever we please (Hubzilla is a prime example; you can read more about its protocol here). The internet can be a place which serves society.
It might all come back to education; in fact, we might even say Confucius was right. If youâre smart enough, youâll see a positive resource and decide that it would not be in the best interests of society to debase it. Civility and respect should be the order of the day. If these tools hadnât been used by the privileged few to line their pockets at the expense of the manyâor, for that matter, the democratic processes of their nationsâwouldnât we be in a better place? They capitalized on divisions in society (and even deepened them), when there is far more for all of us to gain if we looked to unity. Why should we allow the concentration of power (and wealth) to rest at the top of tech’s food chain? Right now, all I see of Google and Facebookâs brands are faceless, impersonal and detached giants, with no human accountability, humming on algorithms that are broken, and in Facebookâs case, potentially having databases that have been built on so much, that it doesnât function properly any more. Yet they could have been so much more to society.
Not possible to unseat such big players? We might have thought once that Altavista would remain the world’s biggest website; who knew Google would topple it in such a short time? But closer to home, and speaking for myself, I see The Spinoff and Newsroom as two news media brands that engender far greater trust than Fairfax’s Stuff or The New Zealand Herald. I am more likely to click on a link on Twitter if I see it is to one of the newer sites. They, too, have challenged the status quo in a short space of time, something which I didn’t believe would be possible a decade ago when a couple of people proposed that I create a locally owned alternative.
We donât say email is bad because there is spam. We accept that the good outweighs the bad and, for the most part, we have succeeded in building filters that get rid of the unwanted. We donât say the web is bad because it has allowed piracy or pornography; its legitimate uses far outweigh its shady ones. But we should be supporting, or trying to find, new ways to advertise, innovate and network (socially or otherwise). Right now, Iâm willing to bet that the next big thing (and it might not even be one player, but a multitude of individuals working in unison) is one where its values are so clear and transparent that they inspire us to live our full potential. I remain an optimist when it comes to human potential, if we set our sights on making something better.
Above: Simon Anholt, giving a talk at TEDSalon Berlin.
Out today: my friend Simon Anholtâs Good Country Index, with the Netherlands taking the top spot from Sweden, which drops to sixth. New Zealand is in 17th, failing in prosperity and equality, and in cultural contribution (previously we had been 5th and 12th). On the plus side, we are doing reasonably well in health and well-being, and in science and technology. Itâs a challenge for us as we arenât keeping up with certain aspects of the game by international standards. Have a readâit’s all properly referenced and sourced.
