토요종합반
Instructor: Kim Jae Woo (sitgs@naver.com)
Date: 2011-1-29 Sat
Tropicana (which tried to replace its straw-in-anorange logo with a picture of a glass of orange
juice) and Britain’s Royal Mail (which renamed
itself Consignia) held out a bit longer but
eventually had to retreat.
Logoland
Why consumers balk at companies’ efforts to
rebrand themselves
Schumpeter Jan 13th 2011 | from PRINT EDITION
ONE of last year’s most interesting business books
was Clay Shirky’s “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity
and Generosity in a Connected Age”. The rise of
the affluent society has left people with lots of time
and talent to spare, Mr Shirky argues. For decades
they squandered this cognitive surplus watching
television. Today, thanks to the internet, they can
also channel it into more productive pursuits.
Why do people get so upset about such changes?
An obvious reason is that so many logos and names
are either pig ugly or linguistically challenged.
Think of BT’s “piper” logo, which looked like
someone drinking a yard of ale and disfigured all
things BT-related for 12 years (admittedly, Britain’s
incumbent telecoms firm was not too popular to
begin with); or the SciFi channel’s decision to call
itself SyFy—a name that raises the spectre of
syphilis.
For a surprising number of people these productive
pursuits involve worrying about companies’ logos.
Howard Schultz, the boss of Starbucks, recently
announced that his company would mark its 40th
anniversary this March by changing its logo a bit.
The words “Starbucks” and “coffee” will disappear.
And the mermaid, or siren, will be freed from her
circle.
Moreover, the people who spend their lives
creating new logos and brand names have a
peculiar weakness for management drivel. Marka
Hansen, Gap’s president for North America,
defended the firm’s new logo (three letters and a
little blue square) with a lot of guff about “our
journey to make Gap more relevant to our
customers”. The Arnell Group explained its $1m
redesign of Pepsi’s logo with references to the
“golden ratio” and “gravitational pull”, arguing that
“going back-to-the-roots moves the brand forward
as it changes the trajectory of the future”.
Starbucks wants to join the small club of
companies that are so recognisable they can rely on
nothing but a symbol: Nike and its swoosh;
McDonald’s and its golden arches; Playboy and its
bunny; Apple and its apple. The danger is that it
will join the much larger class of companies that
have tried to change their logos only to be forced to
backtrack by an electronic lynch mob.
Ghastly stuff, to be sure. But why do aesthetically
sensitive consumers harry companies to go back to
old logos rather than simply shifting their loyalties
elsewhere? One answer is that people have a
passionate attachment to some brands. They do not
merely buy clothes at Gap or coffee at Starbucks,
but consider themselves to belong to
“communities” defined by what they consume. A
second reason is that the more choices people have,
the more they seem to value the familiar. These
days there are so many choices available to
Western consumers—the average supermarket
stocks 30,000 items and America’s patent and
trademark office issues some 200,000 patents a
year—that they are in danger of being
As soon as the change was mooted, bloggers
started blogging and tweeters began to tweet.
Starbucks.com has been inundated with complaints,
such as “focus on your core business and forget this
foolishness”. Fox News, not normally an authority
on corporate marketing strategy, has likened the
proposal to Prince’s decision, in 1993, to swap his
name for an unpronounceable symbol, an action he
reversed seven years later. The protesters have
plenty of success stories to inspire their efforts.
Gap, a clothing retailer, abandoned a new logo in
October after a week of concentrated online hazing.
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토요종합반
Instructor: Kim Jae Woo (sitgs@naver.com)
Date: 2011-1-29 Sat
overwhelmed. Homo economicus may be capable
of carefully considering all available products. But
poor, fumbling Homo sapiens seizes on logos as a
way of creating order in a confusing world.
fashioned corporate dictatorship. Mr Schultz is
about to discover whether they are possible for a
company that has made such a fuss about giving
power to its customers.
The debate about logos reveals something
interesting about power as well as passion. Much of
the rage in the blogosphere is driven by a sense that
“they” (the corporate stiffs) have changed
something without consulting “us” (the people who
really matter). This partly reflects a hunch that
consumers have more power in an increasingly
crowded market for goods. But it also reflects the
sense that brands belong to everyone, not just to the
corporations that nominally control them.
Roaring Tigers, Anxious Choppers
Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011
By Nancy Gibbs (TIME)
The Asian tiger mom that Amy Chua portrays in
her new book may seem like just one more species
in the genus Extreme Parent — the counterpart to
the hovering American Parens helicopterus or the
Scandinavian Curling Parents, who frantically rush
ahead of their children, sweeping their paths clear
of the tiniest obstacles.
Companies have gone out of their way to
encourage these attitudes. They not only work hard
to create emotional bonds with consumers
(Victoria’s Secret is one of many firms, including
The Economist, that encourage customers to “like”
them on Facebook). They involve them in what
used to be regarded as internal corporate operations.
Snapple asks Snapple-drinkers to come up with
ideas for new drinks. Threadless encourages people
to compete to design T-shirts.
The common characteristics include an obsession
with a child's success, a reflex to treat kids as
extensions or reflections of oneself and patterns of
conduct that impartial observers might class as
insane if not criminal, if not both. In Chua's case,
this famously includes prohibiting grades lower
than an A, TV, playdates and sleepovers, and
warning her pianist child that "if the next time's not
PERFECT, I'm going to TAKE ALL YOUR
STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM." In the
case of the classic Western helicopter parent, it
starts with Baby Einstein and reward charts for
toilet training, and it never really ends, which is
why colleges have to devote so many resources to
teaching parents how to leave their kids alone.
Starbucks has been in the forefront of this
consumer revolution. It consults consumers on
everything from the ambience of its stores to its
environmental policies. It emphasises that it is not
just in the business of selling coffee. It sells entry
to a community of like-minded people (who are so
very different from the types who get their coffee
from Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s) gathered in a
“third place” that is neither home nor work.
But it is the differences between the Tigers and the
Choppers that help explain the furor Chua has
caused, at least in the U.S. Tigers fixate on success,
defined as achievement in precision-oriented fields
like music and math; Choppers are obsessed with
failure and preventing it at all costs. Tigers operate
in a culture of discipline; Choppers, in a culture of
fear. Tigers view children as tough, able to take the
abuse; Choppers view them as precious, to be
raised under glass. Their fury at a bad grade is
more likely to land on the teacher than on the child.
The company’s new logo hints at a big ambition.
Mr Schultz wants to burst asunder the bonds
created by Starbucks’s humble origins as a coffee
shop. Some of his cafés are to sell alcohol as well
as coffee. Many more Starbucks-branded goods are
to appear in supermarkets. Starbucks is to become a
force in the emerging world as well as the emerged.
Such changes would be difficult even for an old-
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토요종합반
Instructor: Kim Jae Woo (sitgs@naver.com)
Date: 2011-1-29 Sat
And if Chua appears to sentence her children to
slave labor, Western parents enshrine their children
and crave their friendship. "The thing that
impresses me most about America," observed
Edward, Duke of Windsor, who knew something
about indulgence, "is the way parents obey their
children." There is something bracing about Chua's
apparent indifference to her daughters' hostility,
especially for parents who have learned that even if
you let your teenagers spend 50 hours a week on
Facebook, they'll still find reasons to hate you. (My
favorite title of a parenting book: Get Out of My
Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to
the Mall?)
thinking is why Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael
Dell and/or a cure for cancer will never come from
China." Too much discipline, they argue, makes for
submissiveness and lack of imagination, because
imagination by its nature is subversive; it colors
outside the lines. Likewise, invention, the creation
of something utterly new, violates the authority of
the present and the tyranny of tradition.
But this much derision, I suspect, reflects some
doubts. Western families have no monopoly on
happiness, and those of the helicopter variety at
least do not exactly encourage wild individuality in
their children. Trust your instincts, Dr. Spock
advised back in 1946; but that involves a leap of
faith that many modern parents find terrifying.
Helicopter parents are great believers in expertise:
read enough books, consult enough professionals,
and you can crack the parenting code. Chua's
daughters are, by all accounts, girls any parent
would be proud of. But maybe the real appeal is her
tone of certainty in discussing something so
confounding as child rearing — as if it's a puzzle to
be solved rather than a picture to be painted, and
there's no way to know what it will look like until
it's done.
The reactions to Chua's book, Battle Hymn of the
Tiger Mother, have ranged from praise for her
honesty to scorn for her "extreme, rigid and
authoritarian approach," as one critic put it. But in
less hysterical precincts, she elicits a more
conflicted response. First reaction: My God, she's
crazy. Second reaction: Maybe she's right. I suspect
one reason the book has touched such a nerve is a
suspicion among the Choppers that an excessive
fear of failure guarantees it — that if you don't let
your kids get clobbered now and then by a tough
teacher, they'll never have the resilience to thrive as
adults in a competitive economy.
Twenty-first century parenting already seemed like
a gladiatorial contest, its battles fought in
playgrounds, at book clubs and especially online,
with the rise of parenting websites where parents
— O.K., mainly moms — claw and bite. You let
your toddler have Froot Loops? You quit karate
lessons? Western parents may exalt freedom and
self-expression, but in many ZIP codes, parenting
is a highly conformist activity, with protocols every
bit as strict as Chua's. Commenters spank the
moms who appear insufficiently committed to
breast feeding ("You literally make me shudder,"
reads one response on UrbanBaby.com).
Some of Chua's critics sound just as smug when
they declare that the Tigers' "inside-the-box
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