1 Good Reason – Social Marketing

I’ve been thinking about how companies treat their logos.  You can see the whole spectrum on line easily.  Some companies treat their logo with playful indifference such as Google.  Many are familiar with Google’s various playful holiday themed logos.  Their latest fun is an Easter egg for anyone searching on world cup this week scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll find the image at left.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the distortions of logos done by people with bad intent.  There are two that are prominent in social media today.

This logo has been adopted by the Twitter account for the satirical “BP Global PR”.  Who sends tweets like:  “Sending some lawyers down to the Earth’s crust to deliver a Cease and Desist. That oughtta do it. #bpcares” and “No, our apology ads won’t run in Gulf states.  They don’t need to be reminded of the devastation we’ve caused. Be considerate! #bpcares”

Frankly it’s surprising to me that BP hasn’t gone after this account and sent them a Cease and Desist order of their own.  It’s clearly a copyright violation, and a little more bad press wouldn’t hurt BP much more right now.  I suppose it’s a matter of priorities.

On a similar theme we have the recent Nestle Facebook and YouTube debacle.  You can read the whole story in my blog here, but in a nut shell: Green Peace created a video and included the altered Kit Kat Logo you see at left. Nestle took exception to the distortion of their logo and had YouTube to remove the logo.  Green Peace then launched a grassroots campaign against Nestle which was successful following 2 months of social media harassment.  A big piece of the Nestle story is that they objected to user’s changing their photo/icon on Facebook to the “Killer” logo and then posting comments on the Nestle fan page.  This caused the altered logo to appear multiple times on the page.  Nestlé’s moderators removed these posts (because of the altered logo) which further enraged the users.  Ultimately creating a tit-for-tat game which Nestle would inevitably lose.

A search of Google for the exact phrase “logos may not be altered” finds 7,580 matches. There are an additional 27 “logos must not be altered” for the most stringent. And “do not alter the logo” returns 3,780 results.

So clearly many organizations cannot release the strangle hold on their sacred logo today. 
A quick Google search for “Google is evil” images turns up quite a few examples. And a search on Bing for “is Microsoft evil” returns the following image too:

So apparently both of these companies have a little bit of thick skin.  Isn’t it time the rest of us learned to laugh at ourselves too?  If I were marketing a funeral parlor perhaps I would take a different view but most companies could do well with a little bit more personality.

I learned yesterday at the DigiDay Target conference that Arm & Hammer is owned by Church and Dwight Co. who also owns the Trojan brand of condoms.  My Twitter buddy @susancohan pointed out that could combine into a disturbing visual of the famous log.  I’ll leave that mental image up to you.

Give me 1 Good Reason why you can’t play with your logo?