Comment by tilsammans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tilsammans | Hacker News Reader

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I think part of why everyone gets so offended by this situation is that Mayer's little adventure does nothing at all for communications professionals, in fact does the entire state of the art a huge disservice and tells other people that just playing around on a weekend is a good idea.

Over the last few decades we've advanced the state of the art so immensely that people from the 70s would not believe you. Instant, global communication. World wide brands. Full color customized print runs in hours. On mugs! Page layout, design, photography and lithography by one person on a PC that costs less than 3k. It's all amazing, it's hardly fathomable.

What is good about doing brand positioning professionally, is that you are feeding back into that process, advancing basically the human condition (excuse the hyperbole) and generally leaving the world better than you found it. What Mayer is doing, is taking a huge dump all over that process and setting back an entire industry. I sure as hell hope this is not the beginning of a regression back into the CEO's smart nephew drawing up business cards in CorelDRAW! or something. We would have peaked as far as design and communication strategy is concerned and that's just sad.

It's a mistake to think that this whole exercise was about changing the logo. Mayer has inherited a demotivated and dispirited team of developers and designers that she has to forge into a company capable of competing with Google.

One of the things that she can do to motivate her teams is to take an interest in what they are doing - a weekend retreat for the design of the logo? Great! Marissa cares about what I'm doing, I'm important to the company!

On the other hand, having your CEO show an interest in what you are doing is generally speaking a huge motivator for people. It's cold indifference to anything you do that will drive people away.

I'm willing to bet that the actual target for the logo redesign story was internal. Mayer is sending a very clear signal to all Yahoos that yes, they are good enough, and no, she isn't going to get external help to do the things that are core to Yahoo's business.

Very good points, my spirits would indeed be lifted if the CEO did this with me.

In what way does brand positioning advance the human condition or actually improve the world? What does "communication professional" even mean?

> In what way does brand positioning advance the human condition or actually improve the world?

Assuming you are actually interested and not trolling: properly positioning a brand before a global audience makes the world smaller, and can bring people closer. Say you are visiting a foreign country. You might feel lost, nobody speaks your language, you are walking around kind of taking it all in.

Being confronted with a brand from home can reduce some anxiety. It's an anchor point, and anchors are safe. If you're hungry, you can walk into a McDonald's and point to things you know will feed you. Leaving nutritional value out of the conversation, the brand value is positive. The same goes for all consumer goods. Brand recognition reduces stress, and allows people to see the entire globe as a village. As this beings people together, I see that as a positive.

> What does "communication professional" even mean?

A person who works in marketing, media, corporate communication, or design. A person who gets paid to communicate a message.

So your idea of making the world a better place is to modify other cultures until they are familiar to you? According to your post, your ideal world would be filled with copypasted cities, themselves exclusively populated with chains and products that are familiar to Americans; all of this so that Americans travelling abroad feel less anxiety. A nirvana for the heads of American multinationals but a nightmare for everyone else. Imagine if the entire planet was like an airport mall. You'd have a ton of "brand recognition" but not much else.

Brands do not make people feel that there is a "global village". They do not create a sense of cultural belonging or strengthen relationships between individuals. Buying things does not make you reach out or empathize with others. Advertisers frequently try to associate products to concepts such as freedom, sex, friendship but this connection is artificial and manipulative. At best, brands elicit a sense of loyalty that pushes consumers to purchase the same products over and over again out of habit. This loyalty can be highly dangerous: a lot of people get health problems because they are regular patrons of fast food chains.

In fact, most brands actually increase stress. One of the usual marketing goals is to create a need in people that didn't exist before. This can be achieved through fear, making the consumer feel inadequate or inferior if they don't own the latest items. This is especially prevalent in the fashion industry. Creating additional needs is the opposite of stress reduction.

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