The Drupal Brand

I know I am weighing in on a sensitive topic. I found that out earlier today with my poorly received attempt at a humorous blog post entitled "Decapitate Drupal, please". I was unprepared for the negative response I received (though I did get some positive response as well). Someone rightly pointed out that Drupal Planet was not the right place for the discussion and suggested I come here. So, here I am.

The event that got me thinking about this issue went as follows: I will preface this by saying that I have no complaints about the Drupal update process. Many people thought I was complaining about that, but I wasn't. I think it is great. We did an update on a customer site yesterday and accidentally over-wrote the favicon we designed for them with the Drupalicon. We didn't notice. They noticed in the morning and we replaced it with the right one. No big deal and, yes, it was our error. We'll survive.

The interesting part came in the message from the customer. The customer thought perhaps they had been hacked as their icon had been replaced "with picture of a kid wearing a dunce cap". A dunce cap is an old grade school method of shaming kids who are not trying, in the opinion of the teacher. the teacher would make the kid wear a pointy hat. The hat was called a "dunce cap".

I believe this perception by my customer, who had never seen the Drupalicon, is of great value. I believe it would be shared by many people on first encountering the Drupalicon, which is in effect the Drupal "brand". Many people might not come to the conclusion that the Drupalicon is a kid in a dunce cap, but I assure you they would also not think of it as a professional logo. It is not. It is somewhat juvenile and hacker-ish. This does no good for the Drupal community. It means the Drupal community is succeeding in spite of the brand, not because of it. The brand does not have its shoulder to the wheel. It is a flat tire. Of course, there is no need to take my word for this. I have a proposition.

The d.o. redesign presents a great opportunity to talk about the Drupal brand. What is a brand? A brand is a customer experience represented by a collection of images and ideas; often, it refers to a symbol such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme [wikipedia]. We navigate our world to a certain extent by virtue of the syntax and semantics of brands. We also evaluate the viability of transactions and projects based on the brands associated with the participants in the transaction or effort.

Regardless of what we might wish to be the case, the brand does have an effect. First impressions are very important. In the course of negotiations and planning, a negative brand expereince can form a background noise and have a detrimental impact on your overall effort. "They seem good, but what's up with that logo?" It is something people take seriously on a very deep level because the mechanism of brands is so deeply ingrained in our psyches.

Now, it may be that I am just talking out of my assumptions and not the facts. What to do?

Rebrand Drupal.

I suggest that as an open community we put everything - even the name Drupal - up for evaluation. Don't be scared. re-naming projects like this one happens all the time, and if done right, it works well. I would like to begin the discussion by proposing a process.

1. Ask - survey a range of people including branding professionals, Drupal stakeholders, Dupal consulting and integration companies and the general Drupal community. Ask them all about the Drupal brand and see what we get back. My company hosts online surveys as one of our service offerings, and I would be happy to offer the facility in support of the effort. I will also commit to leverage my relationships with branding pros to get them to help design the survey so the information we get back is as useful as possible.

2. Evaluate - Allow the community to digest the results. It may be that no action is required, but I would find this surprising. I predict a rebrand will be suggested, perhaps not as fundamental as renaming the project, but that should be an on-the-table option, for the sake of the health of the community and project. I believe I read somewhere that Dries is calling his new Drupal-based installation project Carbon, so it seems that Drupal can go forward under another name.

3. Rebrand - the branding process as practiced in the commercial sphere may not be appropriate for an open-source, open community project like Drupal. I suggest we be as innovative as Drupal has always been and research and develop an "Open Branding Process" based on commercial branding but embodying the values of openness. The outcome should be an "Open Brand". I have seen some discussion online about the characteristics of an "Open Brand" and they mirror the general values of the open-source community and the various discussions going on about "openness" that have emerged from the growing global trend in this direction.

In my mind, the open branding process would differ from the commercial branding process in interesting and significant ways. There is a very ambiguous and blurred relationship between consumers, producers and other stakeholders in the totality of the Drupalsphere. This blending and intermingling has been well-documented in publications like the cluetrain manifesto and others. An opportunity exists for Drupal and its community to break more new ground in the way we do this. I would be very excited to be a part of the process. There are obviously energetic people fully engaged in this process and I am happy to lend my energy on this topic should people see it as a viable and desirable part of the process.

The opportunity seems to be here with the discussions and planning around the d.o. redesign. If I get a positive response to this post, I will put more effort into planning the process, and the first stage will be general approval (by the Drupal Association or whoever is required to be party to the decision) of the process involved in deciding if a rebrand is required or desirable.

Let's do something new and original...and open...by creating a new Drupal brand to launch with the redesigned drupal.org.