Quasi-Evil

Posts Tagged ‘branding’

Why Branding Matters or It’s Not Just Us: Old Drama

A while back, when Drupal launched v5, they also launched a new signature theme called Garland. Since work on this kind of thing is collaborative, the theme was public on the Drupal site prior to the launch and so, Matt from Wordpress asked his community if anyone would like to port it. It was the made available on wordpress.com before Drupal 5 had launched with the text, “Garland by Matt Mullenweg” complete with a link to Matt’s site (it does have “Theme: Garland by Steven Wittens and Stefan Nagtegaal.” at the bottom).

There was drama! It even had some mini-personal attacks against Matt in there! See, even CMS developers ride the drama llama sometimes.

Who’s side am I on?

Drupal was naive to think that something released under the GPL would be safe from porting/copying on the basis of a mutual respect between open source software developers but I don’t think they were wrong to hope for it. The comments, however, do leave me feeling that Matt is being a bit of an arse. I’ve never really had any opinion on him whatsoever (nor on Steven, for the record) but I don’t like the snide comments. It annoys me that he didn’t do what he offered and that he’s instead attempting to spin things and failing. Come on man, spin is easy. Learn to manipulate people!

Do I think this damaged the Drupal brand?

Yes and no. Yes, because visual identity is a lot more important than many of the Drupal community realise. There’s an extremely long post (again from Steven) on the problem with the lack of designers in the Drupal community but the most relevant quote is:

I want more people to realize that if your site and/or module is ugly, people aren’t going to like it or use it. It’s as simple as that. If you mess up something as basic as text formatting, your message simply doesn’t get through (hello MySpace users). The only way to change that is to put in the effort to make things look clean and nice.

Brand identity is a key element of marketing, well, anything. The big (UK) mobile phone companies, like Orange and 3 have TV adverts that don’t show any products. Why? Because they know that what really matters, is that people recognise their brand and react positively to it. O2 uses music festivals (with tickets being made available to O2 users before anyone else) and has purchased what used to be the Millennium Dome to cultivate this association with music and entertainment. People go to a great event and, even if it’s subconciously, they associate the good time they had at the event, with the title sponsor. People are more likely to buy products from a brand they trust.

As a smaller scale example, yesterday I was looking for a coach hire company based in or near Kent. I came up with these two. Guess which one I went with?

Back to Drupal: Drupal is seen as being ugly, one comment said, “The other day a couple of us were talking about drupal is ugly. I think this may be the single most important thing with picking Joomla! over drupal.” No points for spelling and grammar there but it illustrates the point, and look, Joolma gets a capital letter and its signature exclamation mark - what does that tell you?

With Garland released as being a new Drupal theme with version 5 having never been seen outside the development community, it could have created a real buzz. It’s buzz that gets things linked (and perhaps digged) and thus seen by a wider audience who would suddenly say, “Maybe Drupal’s not that ugly after all.” Obviously not everyone would love it but it would get discussion going and begin to allow Drupal to shake its image of, “It’s really flexible and it’s got a great community of developers but it’s so hard to make it look good.” (I asked four designer friends to sum up Drupal for me, they all said variations of the same thing and they all included ‘but’). Sadly Wordpress got there first and the buzz associated with that particular theme was theirs for the taking.

So no, it didn’t damage the brand, but it did mean an opportunity to improve Drupal’s brand identity, and thus its popularity, was missed. Hopefully, it’s only a temporary set-back because Drupal 6 will offer pure CSS templating. Yum.