The Pollywog Blog

The first time I saw a 3D printer in action, I was amazed. It takes a CAD drawing and turns it into a physical object made of plastic. Even intricate designs with moving parts–a bicycle chain or adjustable wrench, or example–can be transformed from a digital file to an actual working model.

It’s like magic.

Last year, Stratasys, a leading manufacturer of 3D printers, contracted Pollywog to help them brand their important new product–the first professional-grade desktop 3D printer priced under $10,000. At this size and price point, 3D printing is now within reach of small product design companies and high schools who need rapid prototyping for commercial and educational uses. This quick, relatively inexpensive physical confirmation of a design’s actual shape and functionality enables product engineers and designers to be more creative.

Pollywog provided positioning, naming and brand identity services, along with consultation on product color and logo placement. In addition to a strong power name for the printer, we provided an appropriately descriptive name for the consumable–a pack of ABS plastic that makes material replacement fast and easy.

Introducing the Mojo™ 3D printer with QuickPack replacements.

News of this disruptive new product spread like wildfire across the blogosphere. And as has happened with other Pollywog power names, reporters picked up on the idea behind the brand promise and echoed it in headlines:

As more designers and engineers experience the magic of Mojo, we expect the name will be informally integrated into their workflow vocabulary:  “I’m going to Mojo this and see how it looks.” “Did you Mojo that yet?” “It’s in the Mojo.”

We’re excited about this brand/product and what we expect it will do for the company’s profitability and stock prices. It’s a winning combination. As The Street remarked, “There’s Mojo in the making at Stratasys,” and we’re pleased to have played a part in it.

Share on Facebook

More than a year ago, Pollywog was approached by a Minnesota nonprofit organization with the generic and unwieldy name, Resources for Child Caring (RCC). Over its forty year history, RCC had grown from an agency that trained child care providers into Minnesota’s leading voice for early learning, but their brand had not kept up.

According to RCC, “Too many didn’t recognize our name, or confused us with others. In short, our brand was not working hard enough to help us achieve our mission, and that was not okay with us.”

For the next year, Pollywog worked closely with RCC management and key team leaders in every stage of the rebranding process: brand positioning, naming, tagline creation, domain name search and brokering, brand identity design, brand standards development, Web site design and top-level copywriting and brand voice.

We’re happy to announce that Resources for Child Caring is now:

“We chose a thought-provoking and provocative name that will call attention to the needs of Minnesota’s smallest children,” Executive Director Barb Yates said at the brand’s unveiling event. “Think Small captures our mindset, our passion, our call to action.”

Added Janet Bisbee, Director of Development, “It’s been a pleasure working with Pollywog. Our new agency name is powerful and unexpected. The genius of it is that it makes people want to know more. It opens an exciting conversation about ways we all can be more and do more for children.”

Share on Facebook

Seattle-based Starbucks unveiled a new logo yesterday to divided reviews in the branding community.

The new logo eliminates the name completely, relying only on the iconic mermaid image to identify the brand.

Some branding experts consider this move a savvy adaptation to a changing media environment. Says Kevin Budelmann, president of Peopledesign:

‘There is an ongoing desire to simplify graphic identities so that they can be more portable into different kinds of media spaces. Today people thinking about new graphic identities are thinking about facebook icons and Twitter icons just as often as stationery or business cards.”

Certainly. But that has never precluded a brand identity from having a simpler version of a logo for such instances. Pepsi, for example, uses its circular mark as an icon when it suits and its full name/mark lock-up when it doesn’t.

I have two issues with the stripping away of the Starbucks name from its logo. First, a customer’s brain now has fewer points of connection to the brand. While we learn and remember best through pictures, text provides its own form of symbology.

More troubling is speculation that dropping “Starbucks Coffee” from the logo signals that the company intends to move the brand into adjacent, non-coffee spaces. While it’s true that Starbucks has always been more about the experience than just the coffee, its brand perception can only move so far without damaging its core.

Starbucks will always be associated with coffee. While the company may attempt to extend the brand into other types of foods, it does so at its own peril.

Share on Facebook

The branding world is abuzz today with reactions to AOL’s advanced look at a rebranding campaign, the cornerstone of which is a revamped logo.

AOL said in a press release:

AOL today previewed its new brand identity for its future as an independent company committed to creating the world’s most simple and stimulating content and online experiences.

The new AOL brand identity is a simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever-changing images. It’s one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal. The new brand identity will be fully unveiled on December 10, when AOL common stock begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

“Our new identity is uniquely dynamic. Our business is focused on creating world-class experiences for consumers and AOL is centered on creative and talented people – employees, partners, and advertisers. We have a clear strategy that we are passionate about and we plan on standing behind the AOL brand as we take the company into the next decade,” said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AOL.

So I gather the company’s positioning (repositioning?) is that it offers “the world’s most simple and stimulating content and online experiences.”

Herein lies AOL’s problem.  Its positioning is neither clear nor focused nor different from hundreds of other information/entertainment services on the Web.

AOL’s brand image is as indelible as any brand’s can be. It rose to prominence as “the Beginner’s Internet.” AOL was a safe and easy way for novices to get used to using the Web.

Those days are over. Like Polaroid, whose name now stands for an obsolete technology, the AOL brand stands for a need that people no longer feel.  Never mind the Time Warner merger debacle. AOL’s halcyon days were certain to come to an end as the universe of users became adept at roaming the Web without AOL’s training wheels.

It’s clear that AOL understands the power of their brand’s heritage, because they retained the idea of “simple” in their brand messaging. But now the company is clinging to the very brand attribute that’s dragging them down. “Simple” is now a best practice in Web IA and design, and most marquee information/entertainment sites are designed so even a novice user can find his way around.

Take a look at the AOL home page. Is it any simpler than, say, Entertainment Weekly, People, or USAToday? I don’t think so. It might even be more complicated than some. Is the content more “stimulating?” Not that I can tell.

If AOL wants to save its brand, it needs to burn its ships like Cortez on the shores of the New World, forget about making “simple” part of its brand positioning–that’s table stakes now–and focus on offering something really different and believable.

“The world’s most stimulating content and online experiences” is neither.

AOL’s biggest problem is that, like GM, the company is still huge, but it’s no longer in the market position to act like a category leader. They need to think like an entrepreneur, who looks for ways to carve out a unique niche or, better yet, create a new category. If they ever found that opportunity, they should dump the AOL name and its associated baggage–burn their ships–so they can launch unfettered and go about conquering this new territory.

But I suspect they will limp along, like Polaroid, continuing to offer a me-too product and being just profitable enough to keep the lights on.

Share on Facebook

If you’re a fan of the AMC series “Madmen,” as I am–and especially if you enjoy wallowing in the retro branding, advertising and design details, as I do–you’ll want to check out Madmen Props, an analysis of the show’s (sometimes anachronistic) typefaces, on the Mark Simonson Studio blog. Hat tip to my friend Sandra Hoyt.

Share on Facebook

The Brand New blog (well worth adding to your blogreader, BTW) offers a critique on the rebranding of Canadian retailer, Hudson’s Bay Company.

I don’t know this brand’s history, but its previous identity appears to have been an attempt to “modernize” this 339-year-old company by stripping away all vestiges of its heritage and reducing its name to “HBC.”


Thankfully, someone there recognized the travesty of that approach and initiated a rebranding effort that proudly embraces the company’s rich and differentiating history. Designed using the full brand name, the new identity offers a traditional crest intersected by Hudson’s Bay Company’s signature stripes in four colors.

It’s nice to see a corporation bucking the pervasive and brand-suffocating trend toward initialization of names some may consider long and unwieldy. Length is only one of many traits that affect the power of a brand name–rarely does it make sense to rebrand when length is the only issue.

Even for someone who knows nothing about the history of the company, the name “Hudson’s Bay Company” resonates with connotations and has the potential to pique interest. It’s insane to throw all that away for the sake of brevity.

Share on Facebook