Volume 150: Thank you. Joining the 2,000 Club.
1. Joining The 2,000 Club.
tl;dr: Thank you, thank you, thank you. And a little update.
Hello again. First, I must apologize for Off Kilter having been so sporadic recently. The simple truth is that I’ve been busy, and when it comes to a choice between writing Off Kilter and delivering work for clients…well, you know what pays the bills, as much as I wish it were the other way around.
Second, I want to thank everyone who gets this newsletter from the bottom of my heart. Last week was my birthday, and I had the best gift ever when the subscriber count ticked over 2,000 for the first time. I have no idea if 2,000 is good or bad as far as newsletter subscriber numbers go. But I do know that it started with me randomly sending it to 90 or so people. (sorry for spamming your inboxes. You know who you are) I then placed a signup box on the Invencion website as an afterthought. Never for a second did I think I’d be saying thank you to 2,000 subscribers to a newsletter written by someone nobody has heard of who runs a one-man consulting shop. And it’s all down to you. Not just for signing up but for sharing with others and encouraging them to do so, too. So, thank you. Genuinely.
I’m not very comfortable with self-promotion. I suspect it’s got something to do with being from Scotland, where the concept is commonly followed by an accusation of “‘yer heid bein too big for ‘yer boots.” However, deep breath; if you have anyone you think might enjoy Off Kilter, please share it with them and encourage them to sign up. They’ll be joining a community of over 2,000 like-minded folks by subscribing to a newsletter that has an average open rate of 65%, has been described (among other less nice things) as “The only newsletter I watch out for and save so that I can read it at the weekend,” and has been known to do things like accuse BMW of being a total bag of dicks for charging a monthly fee for a warm backside.
Next, you might wonder why the online archive of Off Kilter posts seems to have stalled out about ten issues ago. Well, it’s because I’ve been working with the lovely folks over at Design Systems International on a new website. And with the almost-ready-to-go one being so nice, I find it hard to force myself to look a the old one anymore. Ha!
The good news for Off Kilter subscribers is that a major focus of the new site has been turning the Off Kilter archive into a usable resource. Easier to search through, easier to discover relevant content in, and easier to share with others. (I wanted to give it a chatbot AI interface, but unfortunately, the meager amounts of money available to me can’t afford to do that properly yet. But when the cost drops and quality rises, look out).
It’ll probably take longer than I want to do the final copy edits, but a new and improved Invencion website and Off Kilter archive is coming soon.
Anyway, enough about me. Let’s take a look at what’s been going on in the world. Starting with those seemingly delusional late adopters over at J&J…
2. Oh No, J&J. Oh Good God, No.
tl;dr: Johnson & Johnson. Late adopter.
OK. So, Johnson & Johnson has a new logo, and there’s literally no good way to put this. It’s mediocre as shit.
The biggest problem isn’t that it’s poorly designed because it isn’t, not really. No, the real issue is that it’s utterly boring, generic, forgettable, and is reflective of… absolutely nothing. Its standout feature being its sheer vacuousness, which is a crying shame when we consider how unique, iconic, and instantly recognizable the old one was. Even when shortened to just say J&J.
I can’t help but find it ironic that the first major new identity to be launched after I wrote a polemic on the subject of boring identities is an exceptionally boring identity. It’s also deeply ironic that J&J decided to play late adopter to the minimalism party as an accompaniment to a renewed commitment to innovation. Surely we’re past the minimalism-equals-innovation-just-because-Apple-is-minimal-and-it-is-innovative phase?
Anyway, here’s what’s going on.
Johnson & Johnson has been around for 135 years. In recent times, it’s generally been viewed as a boringly predictable business that pays good dividends, which has been reflected in a stagnant stock price. In an attempt to juice that higher and thus boost their own stock-based compensation packages, the C-suite recently embarked upon a major business transformation, almost certainly recommended to them by McKinsey and/or Goldman Sachs. In essence, it meant two things:
Spinning out the lower growth, lower margin consumer businesses as a new company called Kenvue. (Another paint-by-numbers identity and an awful name. I’m spotting a pattern here, are you?)
Simplify, streamline, and invest in innovation within the remaining pharma and medical devices businesses, which have both higher growth rates and higher margin potential.
As a part of this transformation, J&J also decimated its in-house design team. If the new logo is anything to go by, that was ill-advised.
Now, it’s not uncommon for businesses to deliver an identity change as an accompaniment to a broader business transformation. What’s important to understand is that when this happens, the primary audience is rarely the customer. Instead, it’s more common for the audience to be internal. The change in identity viscerally signaling a change in corporate direction and associated changes in expectations from both staff and management.
So, it’s no surprise that there’s also a broader consolidation on the way as the newly focused company phases out brands like Janssen Pharma to be replaced by “Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine” (I’m sorry, I can’t help but think “George Carlin Funny Comedian” when I see this. It’s a pharma business. Of course, it has to be innovative, so why feel the need to put it in your name…unless, perhaps, you’re worried that you aren’t very?) Anyway, to see how beige and horsey the new identity is going to be when fully rolled out, look no further than what they’ve done to the former Janssen website.
Now, there’s one more issue facing J&J. One that it wants to get as far away from as possible, namely a potentially costly lawsuit based on the accusation that its baby powder was loaded with cancer-causing asbestos, which J&J knew about for decades, and yet still chose to do nothing.
In an attempt to avoid liability for people getting sick and then dying, J&J spun out a third company as the owner of the talc products, with the sole intent that it declare bankruptcy upon arrival, thus neatly avoiding J&J itself having any financial liability beyond the paltry sum given to that new entity to be on its way. You would be correct in viewing this as a morally dubious path; the strategy itself is known as the “Texas Two-Step” and was initially popularized by Private Equity companies attempting to avoid liability related to acquired entities. The problem for J&J is that so far, the courts haven’t been buying its bullshit. So now it looks like their appeal is going all the way to the Supreme Court.
I did see someone somewhere try to justify the specific changes made to the logo as being for legibility reasons due to kids no longer learning to read cursive script at school. But that’s plain daft. First, the pharma and medical device customers of the new J&J aren’t exactly tweenagers. And second, if that rationale held any weight, we’d see a shift toward legibility by Ford, Coca-Cola, and GE, among others…which simply isn’t happening. Just listing them out makes it obvious how asinine that argument really is. (The following is an old piece of identity advice, but a good one: Don’t think of a logotype as something you have to be able to read. As soon as it acts as a logo, it becomes a symbol more than a word. And what matters is the recognizability of that symbol, not it’s legibility, which is one reason why the Kia logo is brilliant, btw).
Being serious for a second, the rationale here is pretty obvious. J&J is no longer a consumer business; it now has a new focus and (unsaid) a tremendous amount of pressure to live up to the promise of its transformation. When you think about it in such terms, it’s easy to make the connection between “transforming business” and “transformed identity.” However, there’s been a well-trodden path of corporations spinning out their consumer arms and then struggling (IBM, cough, cough). One reason is that these consumer arms drive brand salience that bleeds through to the B2B side of the business (look, it’s no surprise that the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have huge consumer brands directly connected to massive enterprise businesses). Unfortunately for J&J, this is a big reason not to change the identity, especially one with 100+ years of equity built into it. Personally, I’d want to hold onto as much consumer-built equity as possible for as long as possible. So, for me, at least, this renders the change unnecessary. In simple terms, the identity wasn’t broken; now it is.
Finally, I would like to leave you with the act of fan fiction that is the press release. You’re welcome. Among all the transformation-related hyperbole is a monster-level of bullshit related specifically to the boring and mediocre new logotype. It’s bad. But what’s worse is that we’ve come to expect such nonsensical justifications for new logos.
I just wish that we, as branding professionals, would put even a fraction of the effort into doing better work that we currently put into the breathless hyperbole of the language we use to disguise the mediocrity of said work.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the difference between what’s being done and how it’s being described.
Anyway, RIP distinctive J&J logo. It lasted you well for a hundred-plus years. Hello, boring new zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.