The Toilet Seat, the License Plate, and the Egg
Submitted by An Innocent Bystander
This happened back in the salad days of the dot bubble. I was working for one of those fabulous companies that had never turned a profit, yet somehow managed to achieve a $1B market cap. Oh, we had money to burn, and a lot of people with matches in their hands.
A rebranding was a natural thing to do, and in truth our brand looked like it had been designed by the math professors who founded the company. This was going to be the full monty - new name, new logo, new colours, and all the trimmings.
The name was settled first, through the most reliable method known to man (employee vote!) and then came the logo. The new name began with "C", and so naturally the logo became a stylized letter "C". The marketing department (not it!) was terribly literal minded. So the new logo came in, a fat curvy swoopy "C", and business cards were printed and embossed and boxed, and new stationery purchased, and finally the new look was presented to the company at large.
The reaction was immediate and unstinting: "Huh. Looks like a toilet seat." Yeah, it did. The marketing department assured us that no, it didn't, but the judgment stuck. It was ugly and unmemorable and had nothing to do with the company or its products, and now it was ours.
Next up was a name for the product suite. I'll spare you the details, but the result was an odd mathematical pun that even the math PhDs thought was awkward and, well, dumb. One employee, drunk on stock options and company loyalty, did get a vanity plate for his car with the product name on it.
Finally it was decided that more money needed to be spent to really sell the new brand, in the form of a special commemorative gift item to mark the occasion and generate some excitement. Because the company had expertise in something called elliptic curves, the marketing department (not technical but very literal-minded) decided that something ellipsoidal was called for. So they had pieces of aluminum machined into ellipsoids, polished, and engraved with the new product name. It came with a little wooden stand where it sat very unsteadily. Two hundred of these were specially hand made at very high cost and then given out (in a special box!) to each employee and to big investors and customers.
The reaction again was not what the marketing guys were looking for. "Wow. It's a metal egg." No, it's not an egg, it's an ellipse! "You know that ellipses have nothing to do with elliptic curves, right?" Sure sure, but aren't they pretty? "It's a freaking egg!"
Needless to say, the rebranding was not a success. The name stayed, but six months later the logo got replaced. The product name was quietly dropped. The license plate guy crashed his car. But the aluminum eggs, now, those will still be here after the sun goes nova. If you spin them hard enough, they stand up on end and do a little dance of failure.
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