“A camel is a horse designed by a committee.”
— Sir Alec Issigonis

The whole Gap rebranding debacle has been dissected ad nauseum, much to my chagrin as I was a “Gap Girl” for many years in the 90s. I worked in 5 stores with a brief stint at Corporate (Just cinch it!). But basically everyone was outraged that not only had the traditional brand changed, it seemed to move backwards in the progressiveness scale, not forward. How could this happen? Why did they not do some crowd sourcing and at least take the pulse of the consumer?

I know exactly how it happened. I have seen time and time again, a client asks for a new branding project (company logo, name, new development, product, whatever). You go through the brand exploration process and determine who the target audience is, what is important to them, what you envision for the brand, etc. Then you go through the graphic design process and come up with some/several concepts. I am convinced the graphic designer is 50% of the equation, but the review process is the other 50%. I have seen fantastic logos that have been born of a streamlined process where one person (who is trusted) commissions the logo, goes through the review process and approves it with the express approval of the head honcho. I have also seen some great options get diluted and diluted and diluted more when there is a committee reviewing it. Let’s face it, you can’t please anyone, and when you’re trying to please a roomful of people then it becomes an exercise of finding a logo that isn’t offensive to any of the individual. Then you end up with a terribly uninspiring logo. I see it happening right now with a project I’m working on. You will always have conflicting opinions, so it serves you well to determine the hierarchy of decision making power so you’re not running around in circles. To be fair, I have also seen brands get edited to death by one person who might not have their finger on the pulse of modern citizen, and in that case, a simple market research study could be done. But in general, my belief is that the creativity of a graphic design project is inversely proportional to the number of people editing it.

However, crowd sourcing can be a great way to engage your audience, and after all you build brand loyalty by engaging your consumer. That’s the success of social media at its core. One cool example of that some bands are asking their fans to create their next music video such as Foo Fighters and Swedish Band Junip.  Even the PR industry has jumped on the bandwagon and added a crowdsourcing tool to allow other PR professionals to review releases before they go out.

So when is the right time to use crowd sourcing? After all, most companies want these sort of projects under lock and key until the final branding is unveiled. What if it gets leaked, in this instant world of wikileaks, Twitter and text messages, and won’t it decrease the drama of the unveiling? Perhaps. But if you do want drama behind the unveiling, then obviously you care about what the public/customers think. I believe the best time to crowdsource, or more confidentially do a large statistically significant controlled survey, is about 1/3 of the way through the process. It’s when you have 3 or so concepts that you are comfortable with but haven’t yet fully vetted the concept through the corporate chain of command and become so invested in a concept that you can’t change directions. Many clients and companies certainly would not be comfortable with this as the CEO may need to bless anything before it leaves the 4 walls, but I think this is a great gut check to see if, for example, there is one concept that is the #1 leader by a longshot.

“I’ve always held to the belief that the practice of creating compelling graphic design occurs not by employing the principals of a democracy, but rather, that of a monarchy.”
— Thomas Vasquez

We see the outrage of people all the time when they don’t feel like they had a say or their voice was heard. Should they always have a voice? Certainly not! Do you want to be in touch with your customer? Yes. Will you always face conflicting opinions? Yes.  It’s up to you how you can bridle the crowd’s energy and opinions to your advantage.

If you need help filtering out the noise of the crowd, navigating brand development or how to use market research to take your customers’ opinions in consideration, please email me at julianne@yellowduckmarketing.com

Sidebar: I did a little crowdsourcing when coming up with my company name, Yellow Duck Marketing. I wanted something memorable, cute and iconic, and despite denying I was had a viable marketing business my coworker said “if it walks like a duck…” and inspired the name. Being late to the company formation game in 2011, you can imagine most aspirational marketing company names have been taken either legally or the domain. So I naively sent out my list of compiled brainstorming names to some friends, colleagues and my parents with ebullience. I got a note back from my mother saying whatever you do, don’t pick Yellow Duck because ducks are dumb. [Deflate] This was the one name I just kept coming back to, time after time. Is my mother right? Perhaps. But is she my target audience? No. (Sorry, Ma) So sometimes you have to stick with your gut, and keep your customer in mind.