Volume 52: Resting Zoom face.

1. Resting Zoom Face gets a surgical makeover.

tl;dr: Plastic surgery sees unintentional increase as Zoom takes over.

Sometimes you learn something you never would’ve expected but it just makes so much sense that your instant reaction is “Duh, obvious.” Well, I had exactly one of those reactions this week upon reading that plastic surgery up during the pandemic because people don’t like how they look on Zoom.

Proof, if we needed it, that narcissism is a powerful driver of human behavior, because if ever there was a time when you didn’t want to go to a hospital or doctors office this would be it.

But it also makes perfect sense when you think about it. I mean, we’ve all spent far longer looking at ourselves this year than we ever have before. I, for one, know that in several Zoom calls I’ve zoned out the people actually doing the talking because I was too busy looking at my own pasty mug and thinking things like “God, I really need a shave, look how grey my beard is.” or “When did I develop jowels?” Or, my own personal horrorshow, “Oh, bloody hell, I look just like dad.” But whereas I found myself thinking I should probably have a shave or lose a few pounds or disinvest in my HD camera and replace it with something made by Lomo, others went straight to botox or the knife.

Aside from being deeply curious about what people do while scars are healing (switch their cameras off I suspect), I’m also curious about what happens when these folks magically appear a couple of weeks later looking unrecognizably young and sculpted? I certainly hope the surgery goes well for them. I can’t imagine the buyers remorse of having to look at your own badly done nose job, facelift, botoxed forehead, or collagen plumped lips all day, every day. Being Scottish, I’m sure my primary concern would be less my newly Quasimodo-like looks and more the money I’d wasted on having them done.

Anyway, back to how we feel about ourselves for a second. This isn’t really about plastic surgery, it’s actually a canary in the coalmine of what’s coming down the pike. Over the coming year we’re going to see a pretty radical shift in the things people are wearing and how they choose to look. With a vaccine imminent, it’s highly likely we’ll be going out and about again sometime in 2021. And when that happens, I’m pretty certain we won’t be wearing the sweats, yoga pants and slippers we are now. Just like resting Zoom face needs a makeover, all the comfort-wear that’s currently the hot new thing is going to be swiftly axed at the alter of chic.

2. Doordash and AirBnB. A tale of two very different IPO’s

tl;dr: Not all Unicorns are created equal.

This week sees the hotly anticipated IPO’s of Silicon Valley darlings, Doordash and AirBnB. But aside from the fact that they’re both Silicon Valley darlings there’s almost nothing connecting the two.

Let’s start with Doordash. This is a business that engages in minimum wage arbitrage to pay poverty level wages to drivers who deliver meals from restaurants that hate doing business with them. Not a particularly solid foundation upon which to build a business, especially when you have no competitive moats and are locked in a brutal promotional war. Let’s put it this way, at the height of the pandemic in the Spring when delivery was the only option available to restaurants, Doordash squeaked out a quarterly profit of just $23m. It’s unlikely they’ll see an economic environment this much in their favor ever again, which makes it equally unlikely they’ll ever see a profit ever again. Which, it would appear, they’ve figured out for themselves as their S1 IPO filing document mentions the term “logistics” 200 times.

Now, if you didn’t already know, the distraction du jour for profitless businesses that engage in wage arbitrage is to claim they’re really logistics companies. It’s exactly the same thing Uber claimed at their IPO too. (And yes, Uber are an equally terrible business that’s never going to make a profit either). But really, you have to view this more as a Tolkien-esque fantasy than an actual strategy. It takes a real leap of faith to believe that an app company with the sole competence of spending vast amounts of money on digital coupons can somehow manage the fiendishly complex challenge of building a logistics powerhouse to compete with the likes of Amazon. They could just as well have been talking about elves and orcs.

It seems that the financial backers of Doordash see exactly what’s ahead and intend to cash-out while the markets are hot. This is an entirely interchangeable product (even the drivers are the same), there’s no differentiation, no competitive advantage, they’re in a market that’ll inevitably decline after the vaccine does it’s work, and they’re caught in a brutal promotional war that won’t end anytime soon.

Which means this is more than likely an IPO with the sole goal of dumping ownership onto the shoulders of problem gamblers in the public markets.

AirBnB on the other hand is an entirely different kind of fish. Where Doordash has few, if any, competitive advantages, AirBnB increasingly commands the space that it is in. Not only did the pandemic force them to focus, but their agility in the face of adversity means they rapidly turned Q2 losses into significant Q3 profits as people pursued AirBnB listings to live, work and vacation in. At the same time that the entire hotel and hospitality industry has been forced to its knees, AirBnB has come out on top and there’s little reason to think this will change moving forward.

Reading through their IPO documents, there’s a reassuring lack of mention of their becoming a logistics company, and no mention at all of either elves or orcs, but there is a single statistic that stopped me in my tracks. 91% of global bookings come from organic sources and 79% of host signups. This means that distinctly unlike Doordash, AirBnB aren’t expending vast amounts of capital paying internet taxes to Google in order to do business. That’s indicative of three things. First, a more efficient business model that isn’t dependent on powerful third parties. Second, that AirBnB is a brand strong enough and differentiated enough to have entered the global vernacular and break free of the reins of Google. And third, that people really, really, like using AirBnB and intend to keep on using it (a phenomenon often falsely described as loyalty).

It’s hard to put into words just how difficult, or rare, this is. Take Booking.com, which is a huge AirBnB competitor. They’ve spent years explicitly stating to investors that their reliance on Google is a risk factor to their business, and one they actively seek to break, yet they consistently find themselves paying Google $4.5bn per year in advertising costs. (In a good year anyway).

So, where the Doordash IPO is clearly a means of cashing in, the IPO of AirBnB is much more likely a drive to dominance. Using the capital of the public markets to supercharge growth and drive the business forward to create even greater clear space between them and their now deeply weakened competition.

So yeah, Doordash and AirBnB. Silicon Valley darlings, but not that similar after all.

3. WTF? Petco goes full JC Penney.

tl;dr: All character must be utterly and entirely removed.

2020 has truly seen a new low for the field of brand design. Straight off the bat we had the utter graphical mess that is the new GoDaddy logo. Then mid-season, Rite-Aid unveiled its 1990’s corporate apothecary look. And to close out the year, Petco has just gone full anonymity. What the hell is going on people? Has the field of identity design entered terminal decline, are we just having a bad year, or do some people actually think this work is good? (Because it really, really, is not).

Of the three, at least GoDaddy has some distinctiveness to it, although it’s obviously meaningless when the best thing the CEO can say about it is that it reminds him of a girl with pigtails. Yes, it appears that we have now entered the Rorschach school of identity design.

By comparison, Rite Aid was disappointingly banal and predictable. Somewhere in that identity there’s an idea trying to break through, but the logo itself looks like a bizarre attempt to be both contemporary and timeless at the same time, which means it ended up looking like, well, something a three year old would create with stickers.

But I must reserve my ultimate scorn for the recently launched and desperate attempt at digital relevance from Petco. During the pandemic, pet adoptions have soared and business has done well, but this remains a deeply competitive category. Petsmart has more physical stores, Amazon dominates online, and Chewy continues to grow fast. The private equity owners of Petco have pumped $300m into its digital transformation and are now looking for a payday with a recently announced IPO. (Although how well Petco stock might do is unclear, when it also happens to be saddled with $3.5bn in debt.)

With all that competitiveness as a background, they’ve rebranded from a logo that may not have been the best design ever, but was instantly recognizable with its friendly cat and dog icon, to a plain old wordmark without character, emotion, nor distinctiveness. It’s become nothing more than JC Penney in blue, and about as equally memorable (bonus points to anyone who’s actually shopped at JC Penney this year).

The opportunity missed is blatantly obvious. The visual potential in digital is not austere minimalism, it’s richness. This was the only pet brand that owned the cat and the dog. Instead of killing them (not the best metaphorical image btw), they had an unmatched opportunity to bring them front and center and to make them whimsical and fun. To have tails wag and paws lick. To animate them within the experience, make them interact with you and with each other, to create something playful and joyous, and to create moments that make you smile.

We anthropomorphize our pets. This is why we talk about ourselves as “pet parents” who “adopt” instead of “pet owners” who “buy”. It’s this deeply emotional relationship that businesses like Petco should be tapping into, not creating an utterly anonymous experience where you may as well be buying a screwdriver as a toy for your favorite friend.

Sigh. What a huge creative opportunity completely and utterly wasted. Terrible work, whoever did it.