First – after a crazy couple of months, I figured it’s about time I finally got back to posting on my blog. And, with yesterday’s introduction by United Airlines of their new advertising campaign, it made me realize something.

The new United Airlines branding….sucks!

I read a great article in Fast Company about the new United brand – and I agree. For those that don’t know the whole story, United basically acquired Continental. Since about 1974, United’s branding has included what some would call iconic – the “tulip”. OK…so it looked more like a “W” than a “U”. It was designed during the height of disco – almost 40 years ago. But the designer was the legendary Saul Bass – who, ironically, also designed the logo Continental used until the early ninety’s (known as the “meatball”).

The whole point of a logo – and of branding – is to differentiate your company from your competition – which is the easy part. The harder part is to associate a positive emotion with that image – both so that you are remembered, but also so that when a buying decision is being made, that positive emotion overrules the emotion to associate with the competition.

With the new “United” branding – first, it causes confusion. They took all of the “look & feel” of Continental, replace the word “Continental” with “United” and ran with it. But, the problem with this approach is – for those that are making a choice – the question is then asked “who am I flying?”  Now, there has been the argument out there that the branding is irrelevant – what is important is the service. Continental did rebuild their service after Frank Lorenzo nearly destroyed the airline back in the 90′s (to the point where he was banned from ever being involved with a airline again) – but United also not only survived bankruptcy – but came back stronger.

Given that it was a merger of near equals, at least in many flying customers minds – to me, it would have made more sense to merge the branding to signify the merger. For example – keep the tulip on the tail, pick up the font used in the word “Continental” (which would have also been a nice tie back to the serif font of United’s “stars & bars” branding of the early 70′s, but keep the gold / blue of Continental.

Again – there are two arguments about the branding. One is that people don’t care. The other is that people do care. To truly merge the two brands as suggested above – if no one really cares anyway, there is no damage. But, if people do care – well….it makes sense to put a bit more thought and effort into your branding before you abandon brand elements that have nearly 40 years of brand equity around them.

I was just reading an article in 1to1 Magazine  – called “The Social Media Hype Is Over” – basically, they feel that it’s time to create real value from online customer interactions. Beyond being today’s buzzword, social media has taken our job as marketers, and thrown us on our collective asses.

We started out with the Internet – a nice, controllable vehicle to get our message out. Then, we started corporate blogs – which gave us the ability to get closer to our customers, while getting feedback (good and bad) – but we still retained some control over the “message”. Now, with the growth of social communities such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, – we no longer control the message – our customers do.

The question we keep asking ourselves (or, get asked by our bosses / clients / customers) – is whether social networking is really relevant?

Short answer – if you think for a second it’s not – it’s time for a new career.

I’m thinking of a kayaking trip with friends in the next few weeks. I’ve communicated with my friends to plan the trip over Facebook. I read reviews of different tours on Yelp. One company – has a blog where i read up about the last few trips they’ve headed up for clients. I’ve checked out trips taken by other customers on Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, and Picasa.

In the past, I’d had just called the company, booked the trip, and hoped for the best. Yet now, with a tightening economy, I want to know what I’m getting prior to the trip – and I want to know what others think.

The opportunity for us as marketers – is to realize that as costs go up, for us to ignore our clients desire to research what they are getting for their money – that the less we do with marketing over social networks – the more our customers will do it for us. I realize that I’d mentioned above that the customer controls the message now. This isn’t totally true. They interpret what we put out there as our message – and then do some of our marketing for us.

Our job – is to make sure the message is more accurate than ever before – and, make sure that we stay on top of that message. Then, utilize these social media tools to make sure our customers know about our message. Finally, once we’ve accomplished that – we then need to stay on top of what they say about our message – how they interpret it and market it – so we can constantly make course corrections in our message.

I like to think that in some ways, we’ve simplified some of our market research via the introduction of social networks. Think about how many blunders have taken place over the years because what a focus group said was important, was irrelevant once brought to market. Now…you’re going to know the relevance to the market that much sooner, and possibly more accurately, than ever before. We now have the ability to monitor our brands in real time – for better or worse!

I’ve had a number of computers over the years – and since we’ve all pretty much gotten to the point where we can’t seem to live without them (unless your like my mom, who recoils in horror at the idea of even trying to turn one on) – one of those feelings we’d all like to avoid is that burning sensation, deep in your gut, when you turn on your computer and…..nothing happens.

Which then leaves you at the mercy of either your computer’s manufacturer, or a third party repair shop if you’re out of warranty and don’t want to feel like you have to sell a body part to pay for the repair. The problem gets even worse if, like me, you live on a laptop – it’s not like there are many “user-servicable” parts on a laptop except memory and maybe a hard drive.

In the past, when this has happened to me, there is the inevitable fight with the manufacturer (where you would swear they staff their customer service teams with ex-help desk personnel, who’s entire mission in life is to make you feel like your personal development never proceeded beyond “brain stem”), trying to convince them that no, you didn’t break your laptop – it just died.

Well, I switched to MacBook Pro last fall…and part of my decision was based on the reviews of Mac’s being almost completely trouble free. And, I’ve had a bout of “Murphy’s Law” hit me when it comes to my Mac. Like this morning. After an evening of working on my art portfolio for my revamped website (coming soon!) – when I got up this morning (proof that Murphy was working – this happened on a Sunday) – turned on my Mac, and nothing happened. At all. Then…the even worse feeling of following the directions by inserting the Install Disk to trouble shoot – and it ate my disk – couldn’t even get it back!

Now with any other manufacturer – the process from this point forward would involve at least 2-3 hours on the phone with somebody that gives you a fake name (something like “Bill Jones” that doesn’t match the thick Indian accent – which I guess is OK, since I can understand an Indian accent much better than many more indigenous accents here in the States), followed by paying to ship it back to someplace that you’ve never heard of, and then days of wondering when / if it will ever be fixed and returned to you.

Why I love Apple. My process this morning was to use my iPhone, go to Apple’s site, and make an appointment at the Genius Bar. Then, drive 10 minutes to Chandler Fashion Mall here in Phoenix. Wait for about 5 minutes, where they then did a quick trouble-shoot to determine the problem (faulty logic-board). They couldn’t guarantee it would be fixed today, but promised they would do their best. 5 hours later, I get a call from them, saying that they’ve already fixed it and I can pick it up. At no time did they ever make me feel like an idiot – and in fact, even apologized for the 5 minute wait I had in the store!

Now, even though this is the second repair I’ve had, I understand that things don’t always work. For me, the sign of a good company is not just how reliable their product / service is, but also how they deal with things when something doesn’t work as expected.

I keep reading about the trouble the airline industry is in here in the US. Now, not only are we having to pay an upcharged fee for a second bag, but some airlines are now charging for the first! And, since you don’t even have the option of bringing those bags on board, you’d think  at the very least, they’d make up for this added inconvenience with better customer service…but you’d be wrong! Now, airlines such as US Airways are now going to charge $2.50 for a tiny cup of flat soda! And, the legacy carriers like United, Delta, Northwest, American and Continental wonder why people don’t want to fly them, and instead fly the low-cost carriers? Well, when your service absolutely sucks – why would you want to pay extra to be treated like cattle?

I just keep wondering – if more companies treated their customers like Apple does…they’d realize that it isis not only more profitable, it might even create a competitive advantage!