The pathos of logos.

First of all, don't get on me about how K-cups are a waste of money. I know, I know. But I cannot begin to describe how devoted my wife is to coffee, even decaffeinated. She drinks coffee all day, with small amounts of water and other beverages at meals. Don't begrudge her these small pleasures! Think of the guy she's stuck with! 

Anyway, I noticed a change to the Dunkin' logo on her K-cups this week. (Yeah, I know they dropped the Donuts part years ago. Feh.) The logo is different -- but barely. I saw the contrast because the decaf box was a couple of weeks older than the regular.

You can see that the logo is now a tiny bit larger, and the letters are a tiny bit thinner. It is not a large alteration of the logo they've been using since 1976, but it is different. 

I have to ask why they went to the trouble -- because you know there was a lot of trouble over this. Some marketing pro was sitting there one day, looking at the logo, saying, "You know, if we made it a microscopic bit taller and thinner, it would reflect our more aggressive, active, non-donuts-centric approach to selling coffee." And then it had to go through about a thousand managers among the company's 270,000 employees to discuss, have meetings, create and argue over designs, stamp one thing, eschew another, and otherwise hold up making the change for months, ultimately getting the lawyers involved, because the lawyers are always involved. Does this count as a change to the trademark? If it does, that's a whole new level of hell. If it doesn't, why are we doing this at all? 

I've worked for magazines that made a change to their logos, and back in the days when casual readers would be looking through racks of magazines for something to read, it was a big huge freaking hairy deal to make that change. Sometimes magazines wouldn't do it; they wanted to stick with a logo that they knew was cemented in the public mind. Others feared they were losing readers because the magazine was being considered less reliable or less modern and needed a refresh. When the logo change was decided, it would have to be approved all the way at the top no matter how large the company. That's still true for most consumer brands. 

The thing is, Dunkin' went to a lot of trouble for a change that not one person in fifty would notice. From what I can tell on the US Patent and Trademark Office site, it didn't require an update to the product mark. I would love to know what they were thinking. If anyone involved comes across this page, please let me know. 

And be assured that my wife will continue to enjoy her Dunkin' coffee, morning, noon and night. You could put the logo upside down in Sanskrit and she'd still buy it. You could write it in Hobo or Papyrus and she wouldn't care. Just keep crankin' it out and she'll keep drinking it.