new ebay logo!

RFW

It seems like a fairly innocuous change, not big enough to upset any loyal followers and possibly enough to encourage new or lapsed customers.

It's a quirk of marketing that a slight change can make a big difference, if it looks a bit different to someone who hasn't been on the site in a while it may make them look again.

I just hope that when they start changing it it doesn't set off a stream of glitches.

PHARR

They've joined the 'Modern' clean look to the web. Its actually a nice improvement if you ask me. Will alot of people notice? not really.

Crowqueen

As for correct terms, precision is important in some situations. I'm assuming 'kerning' is a specific type of spacing, on a particular plane? As opposed to spacing between lines, or spacing of text boxes, or spacing of pictures? A lawyer looks like they are spouting a lot of verbiage, but their job requires analysing text for loopholes, so when someone writes that text, everything has to be defined to the nth degree to make sure it is hard to twist those terms out of their intended meaning.

It is, however, why I quote guidelines to legislation, because plain English from the OFT is quite good at cutting through the legalese to tell people what that means in practice.

RainbowDrops

Crowqueen wrote: »

As for correct terms, precision is important in some situations.

Oh totally, and I realise I was being a bit pedantic. (sorry pulliptears!)
But I think situation is key - if you're talking to a lay audience you're more likely to alienate them if you use area-specific terms.
It's why I find people in branding really frustrating, as I'm sure there are benefits to rebranding etc, but they sometimes spew out so much jargon it's hard to even try to understand their point.

Years ago a science society I worked for went through a rebranding exercise, and sent out an email survey, to all of the members.
The stats back from the mail shot showed that, while quite a few people started to respond to the survey, only a tiny percentage completed it.
One or two members sent feedback saying they didn't understand what the questions were asking.

The branding team's response? "Oh, well scientists have their own language, and we have ours, so we can't expect them to understand the intricacies of branding. :doh:

PetitMedia

Looks much nicer than their old logo! I also do wonder about the lack of a capital B.

UnderPressure

Yawn how imaginative a change of font, I hope they paid some design company millions of dollars for that

patman99

So they spend millions using the old logo on TV advertising. Now they change the look.
So many people who are occasional users will visit the site, see the unfamiliar logo, think they are on a fake ebaY site and go elsewhere.

To spend 12 years developing and building a brand image to then go and change it may well be commercial suicide.

UnderPressure

patman99 wrote: »

To spend 12 years developing and building a brand image to then go and change it may well be commercial suicide.

We can live in hope

Crowqueen

The stats back from the mail shot showed that, while quite a few people started to respond to the survey, only a tiny percentage completed it.
One or two members sent feedback saying they didn't understand what the questions were asking.

I agree with what you are saying, but this is actually fairly routine.

When I worked with a political party as a volunteer, we did several youth surveys. The party was on the up in the polls and we got a stupendous response from the students at University of Reading - according to a marketing expert the usual response rate to any unsolicited survey was 3% and the survey had a response far in excess of that (though having now been at UoR and been constantly bombarded by surveys, it's actually quite hard to ignore them).

That sounds amazingly specific, but the odd thing was I ran a young people's survey for another constituency, sending out 1000 leaflets and getting back 33, roughly 3% of what we sent out.

As for using jargon - ironically for some people it is clearer in their minds to say one thing than use a vaguer term. As a legal theorist, I still would not use 'antinomy' when I mean 'contradiction', but I am thinking the reason why legal theorists use the word is because it is more precise to them than using 'contradiction'.

There's probably some accounting for comfort in there too - the person is so immersed in their world that the lay language is hopelessly vague for what they are trying to convey. I find it hard, when I want to say 'idiosyncratic', not to use the Polish word 'swoisty', which means the same thing but is so much nicer and less clumsy a word. To many scientists, marketers, engineers, lawyers etc that's what jargon is - precise, elegant, meaningful - that lay language is actually rather clumsy to them in comparison.

As long as you have an articulate interlocutor who can bridge the divide, I find learning about new fields of expertise interesting. I've just got into cricket - I am learning to score my boyfriend's matches - and it satisfies my craving for jargon and bean-counting . I also enjoyed watching the O/Paralympics as it brings a host of new and interesting terms and fields of knowledge. I would imagine also that the marketeers were confused by some scientific jargon too...

patman99

Right. 90% of eBay users do not like the new logo. Will eBay listen?.