the new startups are, are making up brand names,
and so a lot of the new businesses come
up with brand names that are, just these invented
words like Mibblio or Kaggle or Shodogg or Zaarly.
You don't even know how to pronounce some of these words.
Why is that happening?
Part of the, part of the reason is, in today's world, when you
have a, a brand new business, you need a, a website right away.
And most of the recognizable URLs have already been taken and so one of
the ways to get a URL that's
uniquely identified with your business, is to invent
a new word.
Then you're going to have to use the other elements of the brand
mix to try to give some kind of identity to this brand name.
Let me talk about an interesting hap,
thing that happened with brand names somewhat recently.
The Gap brand name, a few years ago now, I'm not sure exactly when.
But Gap wasn't doing very well with their same store sales, revenues
were down, they really needed to do something to turn the business around.
And one of the things they were trying to do
to modernize it was to change the trademark, or change the brand logo.
So the original brand logo as shown on the
screen is a blue square with the word Gap in
white on that blue square and you can see
the new logo that they put out, is very different.
The blue square has shrunk, the typeface
has changed it's now on a white background.
And they put that
brand name out in, into their social media market, and
instantly got very, very negative reaction to that brand name.
The consumers hated it.
Within, that brand name was out there, just tentatively, as a test, for one week.
The reaction was so negative that the company pulled
it back and that was the end of that.
So it ended up actually being a, a pretty, it was,
you know, they got a lot of publicity at the time.
But it was a pretty
inexpensive way.
A lot of times, if you try to change your, your
brand image, it's extremely expensive to change it, especially for a retailer.
There's signage, there's bags, you know, the, the packaging.
And all sorts of things that would be very, very expensive.
So actually, that this got such a negative reaction, that they
found out so quickly, it was, was a benefit for the company.
But because this was somewhat of a famous
incident some market research was done, and some
fMRI studies, and neurostudies were done to figure
out what was so bad about that image.
Why did people not like it.
And there's a couple things that they identified that
when I show you, you can see make sense.
One of them is, if you have visual and verbal
things in conflict with each other, people read the visual first.
And so where that blue box is, behind the P, it, you're,
it actually kind of blocks out the P, and you see a hole in the
P, and the P is not as strong because you're attracted first to the vision.
So that weakened the whole idea of the brand there.
because the P was kind of weakened because of the visual block on it.
The other thing that, that's different between the
two logos is that instead of being all
caps, which is in the original one, now
this is an initial cap and then smaller letters.
And what that ended up doing was making people think
of it as a word, rather then a brand name.
And if you think about it, the word gap, that means
a hole, that's, you know, you have, that's not so positive.
So when we're looking at these things in hindsight, you
can kind of see why that wasn't a good choice.
And people just didn't have a very strong emotional reaction to it, also.
There were negative emotions to it that were kind of more on
a visceral level, and what I'm explaining here is, you know, more thoughtful.