Nothing’s quite as entertaining as a great big brand marketing furball, where a company steps in a steaming pile of do-do, and seemingly can’t step out without getting it all over their pants.
Iconic notebook brand Moleskin decided to crowdsource the new logo for their Moleskinerie fan blog, so in conjunction with Designboom (an online magazine), they fired up a contest — and almost immediately ran into a post from the Anti-Spec blog (excerpt only):
Let’s break this down. A logo done right will take many solid days to research the company, sketch ideas (possibly in a Moleskine product) before even opening up Illustrator. I’m going to be real conservative here and say 8 hours. Real conservative. 3,500 participating designers who spend 8 hours each equates to over 28,000 hours.
Moleskine will pay the winner €5,000 ($7,000). For this fee Moleskine will receive a staggering amount of artwork to choose from; the equivalent of 3 solid years from a single designer working 24/7. This equates to just €1.40 ($2) per design.
1 designer wins. 3,499 designers lose. Moleskine is the real winner here. If Moleskine redeem themselves by dropping this dreadful spec work competition I will continue to buy their products. Otherwise I’ll boycott. It’s that simple.
A single blog post is unlikely to cause major problems for a brand, but as Richard Nixon learned, it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover up.
Moleskine posted a fairly snipppy response on Facebook — and found themselves buried under an avalanche of negative remarks (and another blog post).
How’s getting hammered to death by t-squares feel?
Contests aimed at making life better for a corporation instead of the contestants have existed pretty much forever, yet when your core market is professional designers and artists, crowdsourcing just might not be the best choice — especially when “crowdsourcing” has become a euphemism for “getting it done cheaply/for free.”
Keep writing (but not for free), Tom Chandler.
Wow.
I have a feeling that Moleskin simply wanted a fun little contest to involve its customer base. It’s not their corporate logo either, it’s a logo for its blog.
That being said, taking all rights (ability to not only display submissions but change them as they please…) is a little excessive. A matter of taking as many rights as possible, and then deciding what to do with them later, I suppose.
It is a lesson learned for Moleskin, but I’m not sure it is a problem they could have foreseen…
~Graham
Graham Strong recently posted..OTF: Eagles are a Good Omen, Right?
Graham Strong(Quote) (Reply)
I dunno; I think they should have foreseen it. Graphic artists are touchier about working on spec than just about any other group (save maybe copywriters), and this wasn’t a photo contest (where images taken for other reasons could be submitted).
This was a special purpose goodie — time-consuming to make and not particularly useful anywhere else.
Imagine a Microsoft Word “fan” site (the idea amuses me), asking its primary audience (writers) to come up with a tagline and messaging platform, winner take all.
They’d be roasted (if they weren’t, they’d deserve to be).
More importantly,, if I was going to run a contest like this, I’d be prepared with a much, much better response than Moleskinerie was on their Facebook site…
That was definitely a moment of “fuel, meet fire.”
TC(Quote) (Reply)
The contest wasn’t a very bright idea. Their response to the initial rant from AntiSpec made it even worse. If their marketing team is any good, then they should have contingency measures and implement it fast. This brouhahaha is spreading fast and has the potential to make a (long term?) negative impact on their bottom-line.
Judith recently posted..SEO Copywriting Tips to Boost your Blog Posts
Judith(Quote) (Reply)
TC,
Yes, perhaps you’re right, though I still tend to see it as an “engaging your community” project that failed rather than a “let’s get free stuff” project. I could be wrong though.
I do agree with both you and Judith when you say that their “rant” response was a bad move. Perhaps they thought they were dealing with one or two dissenters, and the rest of their tribe was behind them. Oops.
~Graham
Graham Strong recently posted..OTF: Eagles are a Good Omen, Right?
Graham Strong(Quote) (Reply)
You might be interested to know that Moleskinerie was born as a fan site, created by a fellow named Armand Frasco along with a sister blog, Notebookism, which is still humming along as an indie. I used to be a regular on both, but when Moleskine took over Moleskinerie last year, it quickly became a very different place.
This comment in a recent Notebookism comment thread sums up my feelings: “Why is moleskinerie.com so boring now? Moleskinerie.com is all sponsored or featured artists or boring marketing crap. The artists they feature aren’t very interesting (sorry). There’s no critique, no community, no interaction, no replies, nothing unique.” Frasco’s reply is illuminating.
Paul Lagasse recently posted..the week in tweets: 2011-10-17
Paul Lagasse(Quote) (Reply)
Paul Lagasse,
I gave Armand and Moleskinerie a plug on this blog in 2007. It was entertaining as hell (Notebookism is still on my RSS reader).
Still, I was in touch with the Kikkerland folks when the blog was trading owners. It all seemed pretty heavy handed back then, so this episode isn’t exactly a surprise.
It’s a good lesson for those considering buying blogs; it’s not the wordpress software or the MySQL database that makes it special…
TC(Quote) (Reply)
I should have known you already knew that! Armand has been very generous with his time in order to help people reach wider audiences. Notebookism gave my blog a nice boost early on, when I started writing about Rollabind/Circa notebooks. That was around about the time you wrote about him.
There’s a real lesson to be learned here about the true nature of “engagement.” IMO, it was Armand’s efforts to build and curate a community that made the Moleskinerie blog’s “brand” unique. But the current site just feels like it’s being run by a cruise director. Like you say, a brand is not simply the sum of its parts — whether it’s a newspaper, a product, or a blog community.
Paul Lagasse recently posted..the week in tweets: 2011-10-24
Paul Lagasse(Quote) (Reply)
Paul Lagasse,
Yeah, I’m a notebook guy too, though I’ve largely settled on the Field Notes brand. Armand created a cool place, and I don’t really bother with the current incarnation, which illustrates the need for a few good words in addition to the artwork. Sadly, those words are missing, and like you said, it has the feel of something running on autopilot.
TC(Quote) (Reply)
Always assume omnipotence on my part. It’ll save us both a lot of time…
TC(Quote) (Reply)