ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Church of the Customer recently pointed out how brave google was with it’s logo, eschewing some of the more “fundamentalist” brand tenants of logo worship, or putting your logo on a pedestal, by creating different logos to celebrate or recognize things/events/people.

The specific logo they were pointing to was the google braille logo, celebrating Louis Braille’s birthday. I had seen this logo earlier, but due to my crappy internet connection all I saw was the epitome of logo irony, namely the alt text for the braille logo:

It didn’t take long for the actual logo to finally arrive but long enough for me to take a screen shot and have a good laugh:

In many ways it illustrates the importance of “brand architecture” as opposed to a “brand monolith”. Brand architecture is a framework within which designers can be creative. The monolithic approach to branding kills creativity.

BTW take a look at all of google’s holiday logo’s here and for even more brand crazyness take a look at google’s fan art logo’s (WARNING: not for the brand manager who is faint of heart
How about this:

An interesting post from the “church of the customer” regarding how cutomers evangalise the service:

It is funny because I have just recently been pinging some folks on a old work alum list to see if anyone wanted to share movie suggestions and reviews via the netflix “friends” feature. I now have some extra people who I can see what they rent and what they like and dislike.

Here’s a link to my previous post on the “hidden value in netflix”

On a small note of irony, I had originally planned to just comment on the church of the customers bnet blog directly, but unfortunatly every time I attempted to add a comment, it kept saying I needed to be logged in. That was fine the first time, but after registering, and logging in, and then getting the same message that I needed to be logged in I gave up and decided to comment via trackback

http://digg.com

All the news that everyone on the internet is interested in! Needless to say lots of stories about macs, xp, xbox etc. although yesterday I saw a story about how nikon was discontinuing film cameras, and then I saw it on the register today, seems that digg broke that story.

So digg is a kind of community ‘news’ tool, where people post stories, and other people in the community ‘digg’ (digg being a vote of confidence of sorts) stories. The more diggs the more likely the story will show up on the front page.

I wonder with all the ‘popularity’ driven news we’re going to reproduce the worthless TV news with all the sensationalist claptrap, “after the break, what you don’t know could kill you”.

I am joking a little there, as it seems the news on digg does seem to contain a lot of interesting stuff, enough to distract me for hours.

There is a far more elequant disection and comparison of digg vs slasdot on kottke.org

Update:
a wonderful example of the sensationalism that Digg does encourage on “read/writeWeb

I’ve just upgraded experienceCurve to run on wordpress 2.0 and all in all I am really happy so far. The upgrade process was totally painless, and everything seems to be working find.
To be quite honest though, the most exciting thing about upgrading to 2.0 was the opportunity to try out the k2 template. This template provides far more than just style, and includes several ajax enabled functions like live search and live ajax comments. This is a template that acts like a plugin but is still accessible to customize as a theme. WordPress continues to move toward being a very smart content management system and way more than just a blogging tool. I’ve already set up quite a few small business and personal web sites using wordpress that are not blog’s at all.

The wonderful guys at Feedburner can help you turn your RSS feed into an email newsletter. This is a wonderful addition to the tools that feedburner provide, and i’m hoping will help continue to build my readership.

See the subscribe form on the right hand side of the page, well just enter your email in there and you get my blog posts via email. Super sweet.

Karl

Seems that google and yahoo are in lockstep with some developments, especially when it comes to mobile phones:

Oooh, look they’re even using the sweet Nokia 6682 as an example, as it comes pre loaded on series 60 phones

So almost 90% of online shoppers experienced problems when trying to conduct transactions online.

That’s a huge number, but I can believe it. Personally if I’m not dealing with Amazon or some other huge company, I almost always run into some kind of problem when trying to complete a transaction.

My favorite recent problem, a support request page that only has a cancel button:

Wow, our site must rock because we’re getting no complaints.

The Register, who reported yesterday the Google PC was likely to be announced on friday is now saying the Google PC may just be speculation, and in fact is asking “Let’s relax a bit, friends. A smidgen of practical thinking would be a huge help”.

That being the case I still think that google is winning in the market place through Customer Experience, and will continue to be the case.

Anyway some consolation, you can now get google local on your cell phone

I knew the Queen was hip to what’s happening, but who knew she would include Apple’s head of design in her new years honours list (where she picks “knew” knights and so forth). Jonathan Ive gets a CBE (Commander of the British Empire), which is just below the knighthood, but pretty damn good all the same. It’s about time a Designer gets honoured, we’ve had all the pop stars we can take No offence Sir Elton.

Honour goes to Apple gadget guru

In the latest installment of what seems to be a perpetual topic for me is how google is going to eat everyone’s lunch, including Microsoft (that was the headline to a post in october last year, and Febuary last year I said that google was going to eat yahoo’s lunch).

The latest installment is a staggering concept, a cheap google pc sold at walmart.

So what? Lindows tried that, peoplePC tried something similar, some laptops are so cheap now what’s the difference.

The difference is Customer Experience… Google has proven it can develop world class, easy to use software, search, email, maps, shopping, oh and it’s figured out how to provide the software free and supported through unobtrusive, profitable, advertising. What’s the betting that this pc has wireless built in, that’s also ad supported? There are a few companies that are going to be sideswiped by this, who’s heads are going to be spinning in a years time wondering what the hell happened.

Everyone may role there eyes when I say google is successful because they provide the best Customer Experience, and that’s because many people think Customer Experience means bells and whistles, or features etc. No Customer Experience is the balance between business goals and customer needs. It is understanding that customer needs is not a static point in time, but a gradient, a relationship curve with increasing trust, engagement, promise and reward. Google with it’s perpetual beta software and “invite only” strategies, where not thinly veiled attempts at “viral” marketing, they were genuine attempts to test and refine they’re software, which probably cost them a tonne of money initially, and would have been a tough sell at other companies. In the end it comes down to integrity, I don’t mean being good, I mean that everything in the Customer Experience “hangs together” and has functional integrity, communication, matches experience, promise matches expectation. If it’s beta, then don’t say it’s the best thing since sliced bread, and let the customer be an active participant in the development process. Companies are changing, they are no longer monolithic entities with walls for borders that separates the customer from the company. Many online services are no longer “value chains”, they are “value networks” that include customers as participants in the value creation process.

But I digress, the google PC is going to be something to behold, and if people think $400 a share is a lot, take a look in a years time.