5 ms·
So the story is, as it is for nearly every physical artifact in my life, "Because people are easily lured by bright objects and catchy marketing into associatin
by KirinDave 8y ago
So the story is, as it is for nearly every physical artifact in my life, "Because people are easily lured by bright objects and catchy marketing into associating quality with anything but the quality of the goods."
I'm reminded of User Testing at Powerset. When we did unbranded search testing of Wikipedia, late-stage Powerset usually won most search comparisons by users. But if we branded the search results against Google, we lost. At first we thought this was an artifact of the test data, but then we ran an experiment where we randomly assigned a brand to our search results and asked users to rank them. Same GvP comparison. The Google branding won. We took it a step further: sometimes random recall searches crept in (there aas essentially no logic to what we put in front of the users other than keyword match). If those got branded "Google", sometimes they still won just by the power of brand association, even against Powerset's sophisticated NL-powered search.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aviv 8y agoI thought this story was going in a different direction, where you had replaced Powerset's logo with one having bright colors, and then it started winning.
- KirinDave 8y agoWell the google logo is a bright colorful child's toy, as opposed to ... well... look it up. Powerset has branding so bad I didn't wanna see it either.
- jimkri 8y agoThis reminds me of a post on HN where someone put a picture of a Duck on a wireless charger, giving it a brand identity and the charger was selling like crazy. Users identified with that brand over a charger that was brandless.
- copperx 8y agoHow can an animal give brand identity? Do you have a link to that post? I'm curious.
- sdrothrock 8y ago> How can an animal give brand identity? O'Reilly books are a fantastic example of this that goes beyond something as simple as the name of the company/product being an animal (Penguin, Puma, Jaguar) -- any time you see a book with that cover with that style of animal, you know who published it.
- danillonunes 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16062460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16062460
- KirinDave 8y agoBecause it is a duck, and that duck is cute.
- Yhippa 8y agoI was honestly expecting a story similar to why barns are red.
- felipemnoa 8y agoMy totally uninformed, off the cuff guess: because red was/is the cheapest paint color you could get.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- presidentender 8y agoIt happens that linseed oil and rust, which make for cheap rot prevention and waterproofing, stains the wood red. You're basically correct.
- blattimwind 8y ago(Falun red. The pigment, and main ingredient apart from flour and linseed oil, is basically garbage from a copper mine.)
- ubercow13 8y agoThat could have been because people have learned to associate Google with good search results, because of the 'quality of the goods'
- KirinDave 8y agoI mean, at the time certainly Google was beating the breaks off Yahoo. But for wikipedia, Powerset was doing things that at the time were unimaginable. We were reliably disambiguating cases like "who did Dick Cheney shoot" from "who shot Dick Cheney" and showing those off. So while I agree folks should have a positive vibe with the brand, it was kinda overwhelming when we put random recall results under a google logo and lost to them.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> So the story is, as it is for nearly every physical artifact in my life, "Because people are easily lured by bright objects and catchy marketing into associating quality with anything but the quality of the goods." Bright? According to the article, the pencils were painted yellow to symbolize China, because their graphite was sourced from Siberia. (Seems like a stretch, but that's what it says...) What does brightness have to do with it?
- milcron 8y ago>Manufacturers usually painted their pencils if they were looking to cover up imperfections in the wood. Accordingly, typical paint colors were dark: purple, red, maroon, or black. But Hardtmuth was looking for a way to advertise the caliber of its graphite rather than its wood. Bright color to stand out, as opposed to dark colors hiding imperfections. Another stretch, perhaps.
- KirinDave 8y agoIt's an adjective. An adjective not uncommonly associated with the hues in question. It's also not uncommon as a turn of phrase in english to say, "people are distracted by the newest bright and shiny object." So I took the opportunity. Is this... a real question? This seems like a fake question.
- y_tho 8y agoIt's not a fake question, it's question your assertion (which comes with no citation) regarding the origin of the colour yellow used in pencils, which contradicts the origin story described in the article.
- KirinDave 8y agoI'm sorry, but which part of calling the color yellow "bright" conflicts with the article's presented content in any way?