I have never met an eBay seller, or indeed a buyer, who said: “I’d use eBay more if they would only change their logo.”
Logos do matter. Just not as much as CEOs, Marketing VPs and the legion of brand consultants they employ at great expense think they do. Devin Wenig, President of eBay, has heralded eBay’s new logo with understandable restraint: “This is the new eBay”.
Wenig says of the new logo: “It’s eBay today: a global online marketplace that offers a cleaner, more contemporary and consistent experience.” But eBay isn’t the logo. It’s the people. The buyers and sellers. eBay is an idea.
If you turn Wenig’s statement on its head, you learn a lot about what he thinks about eBay’s past. And, by extension, presumably what the new cadre of eBay execs must think about auctions, collectables and non-enterprise sellers: dirty, old-fashioned and inconsistent. Having been involved with eBay since 1999, I object to that caricature.
And anyway. None of that reflects on the old eBay logo. People have often told me things about eBay that need change or reform. There is always a tweak or reordering of fees to be considered. Selling policies could benefit from a sober review. Customer support provision deserves improvement. Basic facilities like My eBay and TurboLister need the 2012 treatment. Plenty of eBay merchants would appreciate lavish advertising campaigns.
And as much as eBay Inc. might baulk, auctions do work. Plenty of sellers make good money selling second hand goods and antiques. eBay remains a profitable avenue for mums selling baby goods and clothes, a boon to casual sellers and a place for pensioners to flog off a few desirable retro items. That BIN has become so popular is a delight. But it doesn’t mean the eBay of old is dead, Indeed, it shows there is space for Uncle Angus and Argos alike.
Never. NEVER. Have I ever heard anyone say: “we’d make more money if eBay changed the logo.” That goofy font. Those overlapping letters. The primary colours. It was never cool and never sexy. But it worked well enough. In fact, I’d say people loved it. Frankly, I love it.
A logo change, in any business, costs money. In eBay’s case it will likely cost many millions to ensure brand consistency. Everything with a logo on it will need to be changed: offices, websites, clothing, to name but a few instances. And anyone else using the eBay logo too, will need to adjust. I know at least one eBay Powerseller from Nebraska USA who will be regretting her tattoo.
But will this logo change make money? No. Of course not. Not in itself. It is perhaps a show of confidence from the eBay leadership and a vindication of the recent results that have pleased Wall Street.
So perhaps Wenig is right: “This is the new eBay.” An eBay Inc. that thinks it is in control. An eBay bigger than its community. An eBay that knows better than its sellers and buyers. And an eBay that is trying to be Amazon, but with limited success.
The logo changes but eBay stays the same. I try to imagine what Pierre Omidyar thinks. I wonder whether replacing the old logo isn’t a welcome act from a new emperor. Perhaps at least now we know eBay is naked to those who look hard enough.
39 Responses
The one bit of good news regarding this logo will be for 3rd party developers and affiliates. eBay currently prohibits third parties from using staggered multi-color logos. So if you already have a brand and it just happened to be multi-color and staggered it is impossible for you to become an eBay affiliate or developer without first changing your own brand. Now this rule makes no sense and I would expect it to be removed opening up new opportunities for a small number of companies.
Rather than showing confidence, I think the new ebay logo shows how much they have lost the plot.
Let’s face it, it is just a pale copy of the google logo, so ebay clearly have no idea of who they are, let alone where they are going.
As an ebay seller and buyer, this does nothing to make me think they have got a clue, never mind a plan!
Good post and salient points.
It has summed up my impressions of Ebay perfectly. 🙂
There is another point about a New Logo. On the 5th September Tamebay carried news of “Germany airs New TV Advert”. Of course a New Advert can be expected to have cost a great deal of effort, time and money and to have been authorised at a high level. Yet it was released only a few days before the announcement of a New Logo that made the advert in its present form obsolete.
Perhaps its confirmation of what many of us suspected for years. That ebay internally is a chaotic mess. A typical example of Left Hands and Right Hands not having the foggiest idea of what is going on.
If there is a Logo Change in the offing the sensible policy would be to hold ALL New TV adverts and other such items until the New Logo was announced and release the New Adverts on every media possible in as many differant languages as possible all with the new logo to the front.
But ebay being ebay the new adverts are released with the old logo and have to be rejigged for the new logo and are not yet dubbed into other languages and probably will not be for months, if ever. Planning? well the less said the better. But at present the change of Logo is looking more like an idea an Under-employed Executive might come up with by scribbling on the back of the proverbial fag packet.
Ebay = Want to be Amazon
Ebay = Want to look like Google
Ebay, play to your strengths and go back to being ebay. Stop chasing everyone else you seem to look desperate to me.
Why can they not just finish what they have started instead of messing around with new stuff? Product bundle anyone?
I also note that this will be rolled out in October: it’s difficult to envisage a worse time of year. I’d say that eBay should be concentrating on Christmas, not tarting up the logo about then.
its got you talking and ebays logo is plastered all over the web free of charge on sites and blogs, for the cost of changing a few fonts,
we bet tamebay would change logos once a week if it brought the same response
The final cost will be considerably more than “for the cost of changing a few fonts”. That is just the start of the cost of changing a logo. As the costs pile up my expectation is that the final cost worldwide will be in many millions of pounds. Possibly as many as 50 million pounds by the time all the costs are in.
So will it at the end of the day increased sales by one iota? Will it have improved ebay’s public image? Will it have done anything to have prepared ebay for the future challenges? In fact will it have done anything constructive? I believe that the answer to these and many other similar questions will be a resounding “No”.
In other words it has been a total and utter waste of time and money. The one possible benefit will be a lot of column inches around the World in such as Newspapers in articles announcing the change of logo. But over the years there have been many of these and today any such change of logo tends to be on an inside page, often about page 25, and just a short news item of perhaps a couple of column inches and a small photo which many readers will probably miss anyway.
Nobody cares about the logo really. I’d much rather them spending the money on fixing known issues, training cs staff or reducing fees. New logo wasn’t needed, wasn’t wanted and won’t help buyers or sellers use the site.
OK accepting that ebay’s Bank Account is many times more than mine. Years ago I had a friend who was considerably more knowledgeable than me. One of his favourite sayings was “You can always tell which company is going broke next year. They are the one that bought a New Rolls-Royce for their Chairman this year”.
The basic meaning of which was a company that wastes money on trivia(a New Roller for its Chairman (twenty or thirty years ago – Changing a much loved iconic Logo for no sensible reason today) has to be suspect because it is obviously not under effective control.
So will the changing of the logo bring down ebay. I doubt it. After all ebay has such a massive annual income that it can afford to throw away £50million without blinking but I suspect that it does confirm once again that all is not well in ebayland.
why not make it 150 million , and a yacht ,your figures are just un informed guess work
I think the new logo works well and is a step in the right direction . . .
Let us not forget that it is our seller fees that pay for this.
Makes me think ebay have got more money than they know what to do with. How about giving some of it back to sellers?
Chris is right.
What didn’t much matter in 1948 doesn’t much matter now.
I’m off to the shed.
There is a feeling that changes of Logo or indeed Company Name rejuvinate a Company and boost its position in the market. I find myself wondering if this is always true.
When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s probably the largest part of the British Car Market was held by the Austin and Morris Car Companies. Firstly individually and then after 1952 combined as the British Motor Corporation. If we take such BMC just about every town in the Country and many Villages had an Austin or a Morris or in many cases an Austin and a Morris Dealer. My Mother had an Austin A30 and my Father had an MG Magnette both made by BMC at the time.
Austin and Morris as BMC then went through British Motor Holdings(1966); merged with Leyland to form British Leyland(1968) then Austin Rover(1983), Rover Group Plc(1986) for a while owned by British Aerospace eventually the remains were sold to BMW and finally sold to a group of entreneurs and collapse.
Numerous changes of name and logo and instead of rejuvinating the business it actually meant a drift towards final oblivion. While such as the Austin A30 and Morris Minor were much respected cars in their day some of the later cars(Allegro as an example) were much maligned(I used to occassionally see a British Leyland Staff Newspaper. I remember an article about a bloke at Longbridge who had won a cash award for suggesting that the Allegro should be built of thinner metal. THINNER METAL!!! the thing used to flex all over the place because the metal was far too thin in the first place).
Changing Company Names and Logos is not a sure way of boosting a company. When did you last see a New Austin or Morris(when did you last see an Austin or Morris car on the road-except for much loved restored versions?)
The basic rules are still the same. Somebody said “Those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it”. So mistakes from the past are often still relavent. In the case of Companies Changing Names and Logos it is likely that the same errors have been repeated since Company Names and Logos were invented and will probably continue to be repeated until the human race is finally extinct.
If you take a look at the new site in the US then you’ll clearly see why they want to revamp their logo. It’s clearly not in keeping with the more refined image they now trying desperately to portray. They’re moving in the right direction and clearly using our fees to do just that.
I can’t understand why this isn’t accepted by many TameBay readers? Clearly there’s lots to do and it would appear that they’re progress is seemingly gathering pace . . .