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This reeks of insider fear based-decision making. Within the walls of Rolodex headquarters, you figure (probably correctly) that a lot of today's young people don't know what an actual Rolodex looks like, and therefore that they won't understand what the little icon in the logo means. Besides that though, the company isn't even about those old Rolodex address index holders anyway! So much breadth and depth in today's Rolodex, who cares about the core product. Fear, and inside thinking like that end up getting you into "Rolodex: We're more than just the Rolodex!" territory, or worse, the land of "Rolodex: Forget the Rolodex!" IANAM (I am not a marketer) but the history of a company, especially companies around long enough to have a history, is as important to me as their present when it comes to marketing and how they position themselves. Rebranding to try and move past your history is very frustrating to me as a customer when it's a negative history (eg Philip Morris renaming and refocusing a ton of itself over to the name "Altria") but it's just straight up baffling when its a positive history! Rolodex made a product which filled a need so successfully that their brand name became a generic noun! And their solution to confidently presenting themselves in the modern world is to erase all record of that success from their branding? I'd love to know why that is considered a good idea, where the thinking comes from, that genericizing is the solution to your specific success becoming outdated. Specifically for companies who have moved beyond the image in their logo representing a specific product to people. If your problem as a company is that to MOST people your logo represents something arbitrary (for instance: a Rolodex file, or a tied parcel package in the case of UPS), why is the solution so frequently to start using a logo which represents arbitrary nothingness to ALL people? If you're going to have a logo made of arbitrary swirly shapes and imagery which mean nothing, why not at least stick with some arbitrary swirly shapes which -- for some people who have been around for a while -- represent a specific past of innovation and cleverness? For the rest of their customers, at least with the old logo they have a clever story of the history of the company ready if asked. Instead, "Rolodex: We make nothing, we stand for nothing. How did we get here? We don't even know." Baffling to me. |