BoS2015 Robert J Moore - Looking Good for Fun and Profit. When Does Y…

What we do as a company, quick plug, say we’re proudly 100% based in Philly, etc

We are 120 people… still blows my mind to say out loud
In 2014 alone, we grew from 40 to 110.

People talk a lot about company “DNA” – linked to core values, etc, and cannot change… this is a broken metaphor that is used as a crutch by leaders who refuse to evolve. Corporations are NOT people (sorry Mitt Romney); quite the opposite, companies DNA can change and needs to change in order for them to survive; people shed and rebuild all of their cells every x years.

Today, I want to tell a story about our company’s DNA at RJMetrics. And its evolution.

Now, let’s take a trip down memory lane. Because when you first get started as as company, the company DNA is exclusively the founders’ DNA. I can tell you about something that’s in the DNA of myself and my co-founder Jake and this is us shortly after the company was founded in 2008.

What was in our DNA was frugality: a desire to not spend money on things that could not be directly, quantifiably tied back to a return on investment for our business. We were broke and we were bootstrapping.

Tell the story of the argument about paper clips

Here’s what was not in our DNA: style.

People talk a lot about company “DNA” – linked to core values, etc, and cannot change… this is a broken metaphor that is used as a crutch by leaders who refuse to evolve. Corporations are NOT people (sorry Mitt Romney); quite the opposite, companies DNA can change and needs to change in order for them to survive; people shed and rebuild all of their cells every x years.

We used a site called Elance, hired a team, and went through this process…

Talk about this process: there are huge stock vector files of generic logos– they slap your company name into them in a few minutes, turn that around to you, and you pick one

We had too many options… that bottom left one was getting somewhere….

We iterated and iterated and iterated around that look….

And we landed on this monstrosity…
Weird underline
Kerning issues
Reflective surface
Gradient stroke
Dull colors

And now we have assets tied to this thing, but we’re a small company and there aren’t many of them. They’re mostly digital. Website, business cards, but that’s it..

People talk a lot about company “DNA” – linked to core values, etc, and cannot change… this is a broken metaphor that is used as a crutch by leaders who refuse to evolve. Corporations are NOT people (sorry Mitt Romney); quite the opposite, companies DNA can change and needs to change in order for them to survive; people shed and rebuild all of their cells every x years.

The office was so nice that Jake moved out of his crappy apartment

People talk a lot about company “DNA” – linked to core values, etc, and cannot change… this is a broken metaphor that is used as a crutch by leaders who refuse to evolve. Corporations are NOT people (sorry Mitt Romney); quite the opposite, companies DNA can change and needs to change in order for them to survive; people shed and rebuild all of their cells every x years.

It was time for a website redesign, and we hired a firm called X-team in Australia to do this one– basically we paid them for the website and had them throw in the logo for free as part of the deal. Again this shows this systemic lack of respect for design and branding, it leaves them as an afterthought.

But we had evolved a bit… we were able to give some better guidance to these designers, because we told them that we wanted to logo to somehow invoke charts, analytics, etc. Maybe bar chart or something could be built in?

We go through a somewhat tighter process with this team and we end up with this guy: the swoosh (show the swoosh logo) and this was our logo for quite some time, basically from May 2010 for several years. And we were proud of it

People talk a lot about company “DNA” – linked to core values, etc, and cannot change… this is a broken metaphor that is used as a crutch by leaders who refuse to evolve. Corporations are NOT people (sorry Mitt Romney); quite the opposite, companies DNA can change and needs to change in order for them to survive; people shed and rebuild all of their cells every x years.

June 2012, almost 4 years into the life of the company, we’re about a dozen people, and we make a decision to hire a designer, this guy Zach Kozac.

And Zach comes in and almost immediately tells us that we need a new visual identity. And we say no.
We tell him no. And he asks again. And we tell him no again.

What was in our DNA was frugality: a desire to not spend money on things that could not be directly, quantifiably tied back to a return on investment for our business. We were broke and we were bootstrapping.

Tell the story of the argument about paper clips

June 2012, almost 4 years into the life of the company, we’re about a dozen people, and we make a decision to hire a designer, this guy Zach Kozac.

And Zach comes in and almost immediately tells us that we need a new visual identity. And we say no.
We tell him no. And he asks again. And we tell him no again.

And Zach's got a good bag of tricks to persuade us; for one thing, our logo bears some resemblance to at least a few other brands out there, but more importantly that there is a huge difference between a logo and a visual identity.

And this is one of many moments in the history of RJMetrics where our hackathons suddenly play a huge role in teaching us what’s possible and changing our strategic direction.

Spring 2013, Zach’s been on board less than a year, and he goes for broke.

He gets up in front of our company, which is about 25 people at that point, and tells a story…

He tells us about patterns in nature and patterns in business, and that progress depends on the human ability to interpret patterns in the world, and act on the information gathered. This applied to us because at RJMetrics, it is our mission to enable you to identify the patterns in your business, and make the smartest decision possible.

He also told us how Plato used geometric shapes to understand the universe. The most interesting of which, the dodecahedron. Which represents an understanding of all the things in the world that appear too complex.

Oh. Then we got it. Hook, line, and sinker. And we started immediately on the process of rebranding, of establishing our new visual identity around this dodecahedron… and we build the new logo–

this is the new RJMetrics, and it’s not just a picture of a 12-sided shape– it’s who we are, it’s got a story, and it’s us. It’s uniquely us. We roll out the new logo on our website, on our twitter, and we start building other assets around it.

And this is where the story takes a somewhat interesting turn.

Our twitter icon looked like this– and around that time we were seeing really good returns on Twitter ads, so in addition to our followers, we were buying promoted tweets that were shown all over the world– thousands of new people were seeing our logo every day; and if you know anything about social media, no punches get pulled.

We start seeing tweets like these...

And you get one tweet like that and you say “…hmmm that’s funny, what a weirdo”

…and another, and you start to worry.

Guy like me sees a tweet like that, any my immediate reaction is “what the hell is a Y-Front”

… but then you get another,

…and another, and you start to worry.

Guy like me sees a tweet like that, any my immediate reaction is “what the hell is a Y-Front”

Yes, the comparison is a bit of a stretch, but we decided it wasn’t worth denying.

Since we promote our tweets globally, it seemed odd that only people from the UK would make these comments. I needed more data, so I built two Google Consumer Surveys, one targeted at the US and another at the UK. They each asked a single question to 1,000 random participants. Here’s what we found.

And I know what you’re thinking – 2.6%, that’s not a very big number. Let me tell you something that only someone who has been through this situation can tell you: when 2.6% of the world thinks your logo looks like underpants, it feels like the whole world thinks your logo looks like underpants.

It was at this point that we decided to take a second, look back, and laugh at ourselves. And I wrote a blog post doing exactly that, called “our logo looks like underpants: a case study in internationalization”

It was #1 on HN– and it ended up landing us real customers and huge amounts of traffic; that transparency and sense of humor was so central to our brand and our image;

And another fun side effect was that people started reaching out to us who had made the same mistake!

But that’s not all who reached out… explain NYT and Forbes freelancing gigs that resulted

Our graphics team proposed a simple fix: change the angle at which the dodecahedron is being viewed and shrink the white lines that separate its edges so they look less like elastic bands. The result was that only four of 1000 survey respondents saw y-fronts or underwear. Not only had our logo revision eliminated the y-fronts issue, it had actually increased recognition of the actual shape! One problem, it just didn’t look as good. Our designer continued tweaking the angle and color until we ended up with the iteration that we know (and love) today.

And another fun side effect was that people started reaching out to us who had made the same mistake!

But that’s not all who reached out… explain NYT and Forbes freelancing gigs that resulted

I want to be clear as I wrap up here that I don’t view this as a “here’s how we screwed up” presentation. I do those from time to time, and I have plenty of those stories, but I think the more important lesson here is about the evolution of a company as it grows. Sometimes you have no money and no skills and no common sense and you settle for a giant purple logo– it doesn’t mean that you’re going to fail… what’s going to hold you back is not killing your darlings, not letting yourself and your company evolve and leaving room for innovation and new ideas, even when it feels like it’s in an area that doesn’t directly pay dividends. I’m really proud of who we are today and I hope you’ll all remember this story the next time you see that big dodecahedron around town. Thanks.

But that’s just an aside– here’s the point: our identity wasn’t broken anymore because we had a style.

What came next: a style guide, a voice guide, and lots and lots of collateral

Show examples of SEPTA Ads, white papers, our website, t-shirts, data warehouse, and any other visual collateral that involves our dodeca that we’re proud of

What we do as a company, quick plug, say we’re proudly 100% based in Philly, etc

BoS2015 Robert J Moore - Looking Good for Fun and Profit. When Does Your Company’s Identity Matter?

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BoS2015 Robert J Moore - Looking Good for Fun and Profit. When Does Your Company’s Identity Matter?