Friday Funday . . .

GOOGLE MAKES ITS HARDWARE PLAY:  Last Friday I reported about the possibility of Google making a full commitment to the smartphone game by acquiring Asian hardware maker HTC.  It looks like those rumors were true with yesterday’s announcement of a cooperation agreement between the two companies.  Instead of buying all of HTC, Google will be cherry picking the line by purchasing HTC’s engineering unit which worked on the original Pixel as well as their smartphone-related patent suite.  The price tag is estimated to be in the $1.1B range, which isn’t too shabby for a struggling HTC which now only claims 2% of the smartphone market.  The real loser in this transaction might end up being Apple.  With a resurgent Samsung and a potential data+device gorilla in the form of Google, Tim Cook and the gang will need to be more innovative than ever to stay at the top of the hardware space.

WHAT MAKES A LOGO MEMORABLE?:  So what goes into a good brand logo?  It should be easily recognizable, represent the intrinsic nature of the brand, and be memorable, right?  Well it turns out that third memorability aspect is easier said than done.  In a really interesting study a research company called Signs.com asked 150 people to draw 10 common brand logos from memory.  The story, and resulting artwork, are featured in the attached AdWeek link.  As you can see, the drawings are a hot mess.  We can generally recall colors and basic shapes, but the details usually escape us.  The table below summarizes the recall results from each brand – the green boxes (Ikea, Target) win on memorability, while the red boxes (Burger King, Footlocker, Starbucks) have some work to do.  If you really want to geek out on this go to the bottom of the article and roll your cursor over the company pictures.  As you’ll see, there are some really bad logo artists out there.  Enjoy!

IS AMAZON YOUR BABY’S DADDY?:  So when does the use of behavioral data cross the line into creepy?  I think a safe answer to that question might be found in the attached AdAge article.  Over the past few weeks Amazon has been erroneously sending customers alerts about purchases made within their non-existent baby registries.  As you can see by the tweet reactions, customers who weren’t expecting didn’t exactly enjoy the mistake.  So how could this  happen?  Beyond just Amazon’s predictable “tech glitch” excuse, there’s a real business in combining purchase data with algorithms to predict life stages, all the way down to an expecting mom’s due date.  Obviously Amazon was running some type of analysis here and it just went awry.  What’s even crazier is that this isn’t a new mistake.  All the way back in 2012 Target got into a mess by shipping a high-school aged girl a mom-to-be coupon pack even before her family knew she was with child.  Target figured this out based on the girl’s online purchases of unscented lotion and cotton balls which (believe or not) usually spikes during the fourth month of a pregnancy.  See, I told you this stuff was creepy!

Have a great Friday (and weekend) guys!

63 thoughts on “Friday Funday . . .

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