The Red Planet Blog

Can a crap logo bury a company?

Electrical retailer DSG International is shutting 77 of its 177 store Currys.digital in the UK.

John Browett, DSG's new Chief Executive said, "customers have become increasingly promotion and deal driven, impacting margins".

I think he's wrong.

(1)  Currys historically sold washing machines, vaccuum cleaners and such.  Sister company Dixons sold TVs, videos, camcorders, computers etc. In April 2006, DSG axed the Dixons brand and renamed the whole group Currys.digital.  Now, I was never a big fan of Dixons, but they knew what their niche was and they sometimes attracted the odd geeky store assistant whose opinion you could trust (indeed in 1989 I was one over the Christmas holidays..).

Who in their right mind, though, wants to buy a computer in a store where they sell washing machines?  I often pay a premium to buy an item in a store as opposed to online if I can get some good advice I trust (eg Micro Anvika).  How can a customer possibly believe that the minimum-wage, disinterested teenage sales assistant is an expert on DV camcorders as well as dishwashers?

(2)  DSG took the low-rent "Currys" name, then added ".digital" in a lime green italicised Arial font and placed it against an unfeasibly bright-red background.  It is by a very long way the worst logo I have ever had the misfortune to cast my eyes upon.

I cannot imagine any reason why, given a choice, I would ever entrust this retailer with my custom.

And clearly I'm not alone.

Stu ;-)

Phishy BT email

I received this email today.

It purports to be from BT offering me a deal on a wireless Home Hub and a rebate cheque - but it has all of the hallmarks of a phishing email.

• The email is not personalised to me

• Links in the email lead me to a web page asking me for lots of personal information, yet it acknowledges me as an existing customer (so they'd surely have this information?)

• Links in the email are not to BT's main web site

However, after much digging in the email's Raw Source and just a gut feeling, I think the email is real.

1. If the email is a phishing email, it's worryingly good and likely effective.

2. If the email is genuine, then someone at BT's marketing department should be fired for sending out this incompetent and reckless email.

I searched for "phishing" on BT's web site to find out who to forward the email to for verification - there were no results.  Are BT ignorant of this problem?  Even my useless bank have such a service.

I've emailed a general enquiry to BT.  I'll let you know the result.

Stu

Only?!?!?

My wife and I mortgaged the house the other week so we could afford to go to the local Vue cinema.  I can't believe that anyone in the film industry thinks that a customer being gouged more than a tenner to see a film isn't going to feel resentful and motivated just to buy a camcorded DVD off a bloke on the high street or just download movies from a Bit-Torrent site.  Seriously, every time I go to the cinema I feel like I've been mugged.

To add insult to injury, though, I'm then expected to queue for 10 minutes at the food counter because there's only two bored and un-motivated McWorkers serving, and they want to charge me "ONLY £8.08" for two bottles of water and a large popcorn.  ONLY?!  ONLY!?  Some water (that you get out a tap for free) and a handful of corn kernels that have been popped.

First of all, this is absolutely the biggest rip-off in the history of food retailing.  There must be a crime being committed here.

Secondly, how on earth did they come up with the bizarre price of £8.08?  Is it because the numbers are bisymmetrical?  Not that £7.99 would be more of a bargain, but it at least would have had the illusion of being about seven pounds and thus cheaper!

Stu ;-)

ps  We didn't buy the "Sharer Combo".  We bring our own water...

Broken - in fact ground to a halt

Ah, the great engineers of the North of England, how I *loved* to read about them in my Arthur Mee Children's Enclopedia.  Manchester in particular seemed to be the most exciting city in the world, being home to great inventors such as:

• Richard Arkwright - builder of steam powered mills
• Francis Egerton - designer of the great Bridgewater Canal
• Sir Frederick Henry Royce - inventor of the Rolls Royce car
• Daniel Adamson - designer of the Manchester Ship Canal
• Thomas Kilburn - designer of the first Baby Computer
• and my absolute child hero, George Stephenson, builder of Locomotion No 1

So, they must be swelling with pride in their graves at this idiotic piece of design for Public Transport for Greater Manchester, created by one of the children of the wondrous North of England Industrial Revolution inheritance.  It takes a special kind of ineptitude to create a mechanism that cannot possibly work out of only three working parts.  Not a child who played with Mecanno then...

The irony is, we've just delivered a programme to the DFES aimed at encouraging kids to do STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) at school.

Truly, I despair.

Stu ;-)
Thanks B3TA

HD-DVD v Blu-ray: It's probably all over...

Toshiba have purchased a 30-second $2.7 million Superbowl advertising slot in a last ditch effort to support the flailing HD-DVD format - having obviously noticed that *no-one* is buying their decks or discs.

I reckon that the very act of doing this magnifies their desperation.

In Peter Chippendale's excellent book "Dished: The Rise and Fall of BSB", he reported that BSB's CEO Anthony Simmonds-Gooding said that on the brink of bankruptcy (prior to the merger with Sky) they had spent so much money marketing the enterprise it would have been cheaper to have just given the Squarials away (and thus built up a large and appreciative audience).

If Toshiba are at the stage of desperately throwing money about, have they not considered building up a user-base by giving away their players for free, like Xerox do with printers?  I'd have a free one thanks!  The software business realised years ago how to establish a market by initially giving their product away (eg RealPlayer and Macromedia Flash).  That $2.7 million could have been used to give away 21,428 $126 Tosh decks to anyone who bought an HD-DVD film from Amazon/HMV/Walmart/whoever - all who would have done the marketing of the great giveaway offer at no cost to Toshiba.

I thought that one of the biggest jaw-drop moments of the 15 Jan Macworld was a comment by Jim Gianopulos, Chairman & CEO of 20th Century Fox.  Watch this clip and not only hear Jim declare Blu-ray the winner, listen to the non-partizan audience laugh in mocking agreement.  Very telling.

Stu ;-)

ps  Yes Blu-ray is the better technology, but so was Betamax...

Hasbro's Scrabulous idiocy

So Hasbro is using it's big-gun lawyers to pull Scrabulous off Facebook.

Nice move Hasbro. Scrabble, a dying, minority boardgame played by old people has been given an amazing and new lease of life on the hottest social network site out there, played by around 600,000 people (and the App subscribed to by just short of 2.4 million people).  So shutting it down would be a good move then?!

Didn't Hasbro think of buying the property and re-naming it Online Scrabble? Or, doing some kind of licencing deal?  It would have been worth just giving them the license for free.  Didn't they see the marketing opportunities, keeping the game alive.  At the very least Scrabulous users could have been offering discounts off the boardgame?

As one Scrabulous fan wrote on the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook page "I didn't have any Scrabble sets when I started playing Scrabulous a few months ago. I got hooked and have since bought two sets."

Scrabulous has surely been the most innovative of marketing for a board game ever, certainly I know of no better example of using the concept of the Social Object to market a product.  This kind of marketing is phenomenal - it cost Hasbro nothing and was driven by fans who have no other motivation other than passion for the game. No-one is making a bean out of Scrabulous (it's a free game) except Hasbro who are selling more more Scrabble board games as a result of Scrabulous introducing the game to a new online generation.

Hasbro are grade "A" idiots, compounded by the fact that, with their marketing millions, they really should have thought of it first.

Stu

"Great" London Underground adverts

I'm bemused by a "Tube Card" advert currently decorating London Underground trains.

The ad proclaims that "a new Underground movement is starting under the streets of London right now. One that will challenge the established thinking of glib headlines or huge phone numbers."

At least that what is says if you stand six inches away from it (on a moving train?!) and have perfect vision.

The ad, suggesting that the reader could become the Next Great Underground Writer is illustrated by two postage-stamp-sized pictures of - wait a minute until I get out my binoculars, no that doesn't work because the train's shaking too much, I'll go up close and get out my magnifying glass, oh it's William S. Burroughs ("Underground" - geddit?!) and, nope I can't read that other guy's name at all, but he looks a bit like Andy Garcia.

First of all, to compare any kind of advertising copy to the literary works of the opiate-addicted beat writer William S. Burroughs is both both bizarre and extraordinarily arrogant.

Secondly, re the mocking of "glib headlines and huge phone number" - you know something guys, at least I can read those headlines and phone numbers.  I'm not saying they're great adverts, but glass houses and all that.

Yes, I get that making Tube Cards is probably considered the job of least stature in ad agencies, which explains why they're generally uninspired and full of typos (my wife's an editor, don't even ask me about her apostrophe adventures with a red marker pen).  However this ad by CBS Outdoor with its big white spaces and miniscule text is the clearest example I've ever seen of an advertiser not understanding the medium.  In the case of a Tube Card, you've got to be able to read it from the seat opposite - a good six to eight feet away.

As opposed to inspiring me, the ad reminded me of those deliberately bad Advertising Standards Authority posters which ended with the caption "We're here to make advertising better, not to make better advertising.  Sorry."

Frankly, it's just a pretentious advert made by an agency who think they're above writing Tube Cards.

Stu ;-)

Rooney Hits the target

Have you seen the Wayne Rooney advert for Nike in which in a single take he draws a target on a camera, then walks back sixty feet then kicks a ball straight at the target?  Cynical old me assumed that it was done with a CG ball.  Nope, it's totally for real.  Check out the behind the scenes video on Nike's web site and see that not only did the Roonster hit the target on the third take, his first two were even more remarkable for hitting the exact same improbable spot.  I've never been more impressed by the boy's skill.

Here's a thought.  I would have been tempted to run the behind the scenes clip too.  Show the original at the beginning of the ad break, and the behind-the-scenes ad at the end.

Oh, and hang about for the 'throw-away' kick at the end and dream about him doing the same for England.

Stu ;-)

Ryanair's curious business model

Budget air travel is a big news topic with frequent discussions about their environmental impact and the bringing of foreign travel to the masses.

However, having just flown to Verona from London Stansted via Ryanair last week with my wife I have to comment on something that's rarely discussed, specifically about Irish low-fares airline Ryanair: the travel experience.  Some of the following applies to other budget carriers, but there is something fascinating at work with Ryanair that I think is unique to them.  I'll summarise my point in a few examples so that this doesn't turn into a rant about a single bad experience - there is a bigger point here, which I'll outline at the end.

• Our flights were flagged up on the Ryanair website as costing €0.01 each.  What's the point in even pretending that this is for real?  After tax and charges, the flights came out at over €40.00 each.  That's not actually a lot of money, but right from the word go we were feeling ripped-off. 

• Arriving at Stansted Airport we discovered that Ryanair's baggage allowance had dropped from 20 kilos to 15 kilos. An additional £38 had to be paid for our now "overweight" suitcase.  Everyone in the queue in front and behind us had to pay too.  Not surprisingly much aggrievance was being aimed at the staff.

• Next was the ongoing attempt to sell us a Priority Boarding Pass for an extra few quid.  Right up to the departure gate, Ryanair staff were selling these passes like raffle tickets to the extent that about a third of the flight had them (60 are offered on planes with a capacity of 189).  Surely their usefulness diminishes the more they issue?  No-one seemed to realise this, but the result was that it caused a lot of tension and bad feeling in the many queues as everyone who'd paid their money felt that it entitled them to go to the front of every queue.

• When you get on the plane, its interior is full of Ryanair's migraine-inducing corporate yellow plastic.  It's made even worse with banner ads pasted on all of the over-head lockers. 

• In order to save an inch and make cleaning easier the elasticated magazine holders on the chairs in front have been removed. I imagine that cumulatively they've saved enough space to add another row.  Here's the thing, though, the safety card is stuck on the headrest twelve miserable inches in front of your face.  Now, I fly a lot, but I hate every gut-wrenching minute of it.  So, why throughout my two hour flight must I be reminded that the plane might crash?!  Maybe it's to make me buy a drink from their over-priced trolley service.

• I don't even get a free cup of tea, but I have to endure constant tannoy announcements advertising said trolley service, the sale of duty free tat, and worst of all, their charity-scam scratchcards.  Ryanair is a deeply tacky brand - and they have no shame about it.

So, the point I promised:  When calculating the price for a service, one puts unit cost and sales on a graph.  The optimum cost to charge for a service is the intersection, with the highest price that the greatest number of customers will pay.  With Ryanair, though, it appears that their business model is based on how much appalling service they can pile on before the customer finally snaps and decides that the mythical "low price" ticket simply isn't worth the utterly miserable travelling experience that accompanies it.

Stu ;-)

ps  If you get so annoyed with Ryanair's pathetic service, they are currently promoting a free in-flight punch-up on their web site.

Branding madness

We're very fond of our clients at sanofi-aventis.  They're all lovely people and we produce some really nice work for them (via our chums at their agency Radical Departures).  One project even won a major award.  It's always a pleasure working with them.

Can I just have a go at their branding, though, which continually causes us grief?!

So, in 2004 the company was formed by the merger of French companies Sanofi-Synthélabo and Aventis Pharma.  The resultant company was called Sanofi-Aventis.  Sorry, sanofi aventis.  No, sanofi-aventis.  No capitals.  And a hyphen.

Can you see what the problem might be?  Apart from the simple infuriating fact that design agencies seem to get a kick out of ignoring the laws of English grammar and spelling, the main problem is - if the company name has no capitals, what do you do if a sentence begins with the name of the company?  Do you use a capital letter?  To avoid this problem, don't start a sentence with the company name is the line we've been given.  So, the company's own name is so broken that it can't be used at the beginning of sentences!  What kind of insanity is that?!

Oh, and by the way, the sanofi-aventis logo has no hyphen.  Don't get me started.

Stu ;-)