Has Airbnb made a branding “balls-up”?

After the grave subject-matter of my previous post, I thought it would be fun to turn my attention to a lighter story. Lighter though it may be, it’s still a fascinating branding, marketing and PR case-study and a source of serious consideration, once you’ve stopped sniggering.

It concerns last week’s launch of Airbnb’s new branding. The popular holiday-apartment-rental website revealed a radical departure from its original light-blue and white script style logo, to a red and white livery with a new insignia. 

Airbnb’s old logo

Problem is, nobody seems to know what the logo stands for,. Techcrunch went as far as describing it as “a Rorschach test for everyone who saw it,” and this very lack of definition is giving rise to some rather mischievous suggestions.

Airbnb’s new logo

So, is it . . .

• An inverted heart?
• Peter Griffin’s (Family Guy) chin?
• A bum
• A pair of breasts?
• A pair of balls, or a vagina?

Amid much hilarity online, Gizmodo proved to be fond of the last suggestion, as was the Valleywag blog on Gawker . A Tumblr site rapidly appeared with a bunch of other recommendations, some more salacious than others.

The designers stressed the new logo’s simplicity to replicate and remember. They call it the Bélo and they’re keen for it to be as ubiquitious as the Wi-Fi symbol. Apparently, according to Airbnb, it combines elements of a person with their arms outstretched, preparing to hug you; a map location marker, a heart and the A from the Airbnb name. It’s supposed to indicate a sense of belonging, and this is to be enhanced with the logo’s ability to be customised by users, according to Airbnb. 

 

Another imaginative suggestion for what the new logo stands for.

So has the brand re-boot been a success, or, in rather apposite Cockney argot, a great big “balls-up”?

This is a difficult one to call, in my opinion. I don’t suppose that the good people at Airbnb anticipated becoming the butt of so many jokes. (I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist a cheeky pun myself) and certainly they’ve been initially dismayed by the giggles to which they’ve given rise. In the UK, the Daily Mail reported a rather po-faced and peevish defence of the re-branding by Airbnb founder and CTO Nathan Blecharczyk, who said: “It’s just like: Go ahead, laugh all you want, guys. We wouldn’t want to design a logo that caters to the lowest common denominator.” The newspaper even suggested that Airbnb claims the new logo will become as recognizable as the Nike swoosh.

Top marks for ambition, Mr. Blecharczyk and team. Thing is, it would be all too easy to be dismissive of them except for a couple of important considerations. First, consumers are notoriously bad at handling change. We cling to the familiar. After all, isn’t it always that case that, “they don’t make things like they used to.” Nevertheless, once change happens, we are remarkably adaptable, and before long we’ll forget how things really used to be, unless we’re reminded of them. So the chances are the same thing will happen with this re-branding. 

Secondly, if the top brass at Airbnb play this situation correctly, they could really make it work in their favour. 

I’ve just Googled “new Airbnb logo”. In only 39 seconds, it says it has identified 13,400,000 web search results, and in 22 seconds, 25,900 news results. That’s a fantastic amount of noise for a story about a brand’s new logo and typeface. I hazard a guess that Airbnb would have been hard-pressed to generate this much discussion, PR coverage and brand recognition so rapidly.

This word-of-mouth is something on which Airbnb can build, providing they show a bit of humility and a big sense of humour. Globally, people are talking about Airbnb’s re-branding. Who’d have thunk it? They should embrace the amusement they’re providing, and use the laughs, and the fascination to explain their brand, and show that they’re a fun, transparent, “human” company.

There’s a lesson here. Things might look messy at the beginning, but with the right positioning and attitude, there’s often an opportunity, and a way to make things work. It remains to be seen whether it will in this case.

• What do you think of the logo and the re-branding?
• What does it remind you of?
• Can Airbnb can make it work? How?

I’d love to hear what you think.