
It looks like MS have got their head in the clouds...
Microsoft has given Azure’s logo a tweak for the second time in four years. “Our ability to meet your business and innovation needs is in part due to our growth mindset—which extends from front-end user experiences to small details like graphics and icons,” wrote senior product marketing manager Erin Zefkeles late last week. …
sounds about right. Our marketing team tweaks our "brand guidelines" about once every six months, faster than we can update the website to match. Of course, all new pages added have to adhere to the most recent brand guidelines, so what we actually have is a mess of pages built over two years that can be dated to within a few months if you knew what colour palette to look for.
If only that were the limit of what they wanted changed.
As an example, their "brand guidelines" include colours and logos used in site images (which they provide during page build and rarely revise). There are plenty of other "requirements" that do not readily lend themselves to global styles and are usually ignored in the name of consistency and sanity.
I have had to sat through numerous meetings where marketing department people spout shite like this, and whilst I understand that a good product needs to be marketed and sold, I always wonder how much more effective they'd be at their job if they saw through all the bullshit and stopped wasting vast amounts of time going on about "how excited they are about our new icon" and other such rubbish.
Ah, but I've reacted to the campaign so I've noticed it and therefore they've won haven't they? At least, that always seems to be their justification.
at a previous (compulsory) meeting where one of the top brass (long moved on!) showed us minions the latest rearranging of the deckchairs, I pointed out the the 'reinventing our core values' was basically the same core values but with different names.
I also pointed out that the pyramid of 'our values' had the customer right at the bottom rather than in prime position up at the very top... strangely that powerpoint slide didn't seem to make it to the final version published to our intranet
“Our ability to meet your business and innovation needs is in part due to our growth mindset—which extends from front-end user experiences to small details like graphics and icons,” wrote senior product marketing manager Erin Zefkeles...
Lady, you have been inhaling your own fumes.