Growth hacks in marketing & advertising.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• When I started out in this biz roughly two decades ago, fooling around with a company logo was considered a quasi-mortal sin of bad taste.
• A serious, unprofessional faux pas.
• Utter sloppiness.
• Or, worse, branding suicide.
• Strict corporate identity guidelines were enforced.
• Logos were sacred cows.
• Lemme give you an example.
• When FedEx was my client, during my stint as creative director with BBDO, I tried to sell them a campaign based on the concept that the concealed arrow in their logo could and should be used as a great visual device to play around with and convey multiple key brand attributes: speed, determination, strength, can-do attitude, positive thinking.
• I thought it was a creative home run.
• They begged to differ.
• “They” being a team inside the company deemed by their peers the “brand Nazis”: a bunch of annoying sticklers and nitpickers devoted to protecting the FedEx corporate identity from any deviation.
• Of course, the epithet was an allusion to Seinfeld’s character “The soup Nazi”.
• By no means am I accusing FedEx’s employees of normalizing National Socialism or entertaining Third Reich sympathies.
• They colloquially called them “brand Nazis” -behind their backs, needless to say- as a criticism, duh.
• Because they were notoriously strict, dogmatic and authoritarian in their observance of “the rules”.
• What rules were they talking about?
• Are there any rules in a quintessential nobody-knows-anything racket such as marketing, advertising & design?
• Mind you, a lot of people in our industry still believe that handling a company logo and its applications demands an obsessive, militaristic and rigid mindset.
• These garden variety pedants seem to have not noticed the fact that the most revered brand in the world, that’d be Google*, has happily tossed away their rulebook and decided to do the polar opposite.
• According to Google, doodling with one’s logo can be a great way to generate buzz, traffic and, ultimately, to keep the brand alive.
• Behold the Google doodle ( https://www.google.com/doodles/ ) the playful iteration of the Google logo that is roll out almost every single day to celebrate or commemorate something such as, say, the anniversary of Albert Einstein’s first enunciation of the theory of relativity.
• Or St. Patrick’s Day.
• You don’t expect Google to make decisions based on folly or whim, do you?
• Those nerds holed up in the Mountain View, CA, mothership operate on big, diamond-hard data.
• Which leads us, dear reader, to the headline of this column: the Google doodle is the very definition of a “growth hack”.
• Loosely defined, “growth hacking” is the constant tweaking of a product and its marketing to find the sweet spot of maximum user engagement with minimum friction.
• By definition, it is a never-ending process.
• Living in Beta mode.
• Perpetual AB testing.
• The premise being that there always is room for improvement.
• The presumption that perfection is impossible.
• Remember the good old “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
• Well, for a growth hacker, nothing is not broke and nothing doesn’t need fixing.
• Have you noticed that pretty much every single time you download an upgrade of an app to your mobile phone the logo changes?
• Some very successful companies out there, such as Instagram or Uber, seem to have no qualms at giving their logos a periodical facelift.
• Silicon Valley prides itself in breaking all the rules of strategy, marketing, design, engagement.
• At laser speed, sometimes once a month.
• Growth hacking.
• To be continued next week.

*Google is ranked as the world’s most valuable global brand by 2016 BrandZ Top 100 Global Brands. Millward Brown and WPP have published the 2016 BrandZ™ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking and report. The annual report, now in its 11th year, provides great insight on the value of global brands across 14 categories. You can view and download HERE