IKEA Type Fuss: Do Customers Care?
At the risk of giving it more oxygen, a few words on "Verdanagate" -- the big fuss over Ikea's decision to switch its catalogue font from Futura to the more practical (and cheaper) Verdana.
The voice of reason comes from Chris Bailey, who asks whether the (largely online, heavily Tweeted) outcries of those who consider the widely-used Verdana the work of the devil should worry Ikea's customer-service reps at all.
It would seem not. As Bailey discovers with a bit of research, at IKEAFANS, an online and unofficial online fanclub for the Swedish furniture chain, the switch of font has generated "zero chatter".
In other words, those design purists who take issue with the font change may not (probably aren't) Ikea's loyal shoppers. If Bailey is right, the whole storm-in-a-teacup has revealed a more persistent problem to do with social media.
As enamoured as we are of social media's immediacy, that reliance on rapid responses may preclude deeper consideration of the points raised, or research into their validity (a point that brings to mind Nicholas Carr's article of last year, "Is Google Making Us Stupid"?)
Should corporates relent if the blogosphere comes down too heavily on their branding choices? Pepsi dropped its Tropicana re-brand after the public gave it the thumbs down, and the Ikea drama's already earned itself an entry on Wikipedia, which might be enough to ruffle any brand manager's composure.
Twitter's users number in the millions, Facebook's in the hundreds of millions -- so it's hardly surprising businesses are actively encouraged to build their social media profiles so they can listen and respond to customers. How they should respond is largely unproven.
Is it smart, for example, to use Twitter as "an early warning system to detect trouble coming over the hill", as BNET reader Paul Harvey observed on an earlier post on this blog? While it appears to be working for some (he's got a thread on Carphone Warehouse's success here), it's easy to see how a business could start running up blind alleys and become snagged on issues that are not core to its customer service.
According to type design expert Simon Garfield, the change matters -- there are more copies of the Ikea catalogue printed each year than the Bible", meaning it "has adopted a cloak of heavy responsibility".
Maybe among typeface purists. But among the flat-pack fan club, it'll take more than a font alteration to dent their ardour. As one IKEAFAN tweet goes, "If IKEA was a person, I would marry it." Still somebody's type, then.