Volume 008: OMG GoDaddy. Need I say more?

1. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. GoDaddy, what have you done?

Tl;dr: It took just two weeks for the first truly awful rebrand of 2020.

What is it? Is it an upside down squashed AirBnB logo? Did someone mess with the aspect ratio and forget to change it back? Is it an April fools joke in January? And who or what is the perfectly coiffed hipster in an apron looking at so lovingly? And why is he in an apron? I can’t answer any of these questions, but they all spring to mind when I look at the utter awfulness of the GoDaddy rebrand.

The CEO says their mess of a logomark (how on earth do you make something look generic, ugly and confusing all at the same time?) reminds him of a girl in a pigtail. What is this, the Rorschach school of branding? I really wish I were kidding.

But aside from my own subjective opinions, let’s look at where this truly falls down. They’re trying to create a perception change that shifts GoDaddy from a sole association with domain names to a broader suite of small business services, such as website building and hosting. Fair enough. I get that. But the way they’re executing makes absolutely no sense. If you wade through the nonsensical drivel about being an entrepreneur’s secret sauce, it boils down to the following: They’re competing with Squarespace by creating a website that looks like it was created using Squarespace. Huh? Take away the mess of a symbol and this could literally be any one of a thousand online brands selling anything from discount Cialis to eyeglasses. Same stock imagery. Same typefaces. Same layouts. Same people. Same color palettes.

It’s truly a shame that there’s no conceptual idea at play here, no reflection of the relationship between them and their small business customers, and no delightful design twist that clues us in to this new GoDaddy. Nope. Instead, it’s just generic, me too, wanna-be-like-the-internet-kids, but with a worse logo. So disappointing.

2. Brand building will be our focus in 2020. How do we do that again?

Tl;dr: Marketers to pivot back to brand, don’t know how.

Following on from our friends at GoDaddy, the good folks over at WARC recently published a report stating that marketers intend to pivot back to brand this year. This makes sense, as the overwhelming focus in recent years on short-term ROI, personalization, digital performance marketing, and the unhealthy fetishization of efficiency at the expense of effectiveness haven’t worked out so well.

However, reading the article, I found it profound that 1 in 3 senior marketers state that they don’t know how to build a brand. There could be many reasons for this. It could be that they feel the methods for building brands are changing and they’re not on top of them, or it could be that they’re concerned about the notoriously difficult-to-measure effects of brand on the business. But, my suspicion is that corporations have pivoted so hard toward digital and performance marketing that there just aren’t that many marketing executives left who are experienced in building brands. I could easily be wrong, but if not, it’s a fairly sobering thought.

For a subject that’s been studied, written about and executed for over 60 years, you’d think we’d have a better body of knowledge available to marketers on brand-building. I mean, we typically require others at senior levels in the organization to have professional qualifications, so why not marketers?

Subliminal hint: Email me. I’m delighted to help with brand-building, even if you’re from GoDaddy maybe especially if you’re from GoDaddy.

3. From Go to Bó.

Tl;dr: UK banking is looking a lot like airlines did 20 years ago.

Just before the end of the year, I noticed Royal Bank of Scotland in the UK had launched a new mobile bank called Bó. Handily their website includes a pronunciation guide, stating the correct pronunciation of Bó is like Go, not B-O, like body odor, or buh, like a cat hacking up a furball.

At first I was curious about the accompanying PR blurb stating this was a completely new approach to creating a brand based on the experience rather than the traditional method of defining the dimensions of the brand first. Having taken a careful look at what they created, I’m sad to announce that new methods of creating brands seem just as likely to lead to crappy stock photography driven branding as the old. Oh well.

But that isn’t the point here, because Bó really is the Go of banking. Twenty years ago, British Airways created discount airline Go because it feared low-cost deregulated air travel. It wasn’t created out of a sense of opportunity, but of fear. Bó is the same thing. Recent open banking laws have led to an explosion in innovative lower-cost mobile banks in the UK. Doing a cursory search, I found around 15 new “challenger” banks actively competing for business. Via simple math, a similar regulatory change in the US might translate to around 90 new mobile banks. That’s a lot of new competition.

With market concentration being a standout feature of the US economy, it would be nice to see de-regulation focused on increasing economic dynamism rather than just making it easier to poison us.

4. Wondering how much coffee to drink? The U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command Biotechnology High-Performance Computing Software Applications Institute (sic) has your back.

Tl;dr: Yes, I picked this story solely because of the spectacularly long name.

Turns out the US military has been studying sleep patterns to try and understand the optimum amount of caffeine required to keep us alert and fighting fit. Which is probably a good idea considering 40% of military personnel currently operate on less than five hours sleep per night. And those are just the forces here in the US, not those on active deployment elsewhere in the world.

Like so many things first developed for the military, they’re also looking to bring it to civilian life. This time through a mobile app called 2B-Alert that will tell you your ideal caffeine consumption for future alertness and cognitive performance. Perfect for students, startup entrepreneurs burning the midnight oil and pretty much anyone working at an agency.

Hopefully it’ll lead to fewer deaths from caffeine overconsumption (a surprisingly common reason for an ER visit). I also wonder what Red Bull, Monster or Rip It might do with this algorithm…