Why don't you do your own research to compare the success of products with and without a character in their logos.

You can have a character, just not as part of the logo

http://fortune.com/unicorns/

And if you don't have customers to ask, then that should be your #1 priority instead of worrying about your logo. Github launched and worried about their octocat way, way later.

There are grammatical typos. The poster appears to have little professional experience in an area they're attempting to get reinforcing opinions for their stance from HN for, and the entire question seems both shallow, stupid and ridiculous.

Someone with apparently no experience in branding or marketing wants to override their experienced colleague and thinks it's going to mean the difference between a 'unicorn' and a... moderately successful company?

You came here looking for validation, but what you really need to do is focus on the things that actually matter and trust your team to make the best decisions they can. At the very least you might still have friends a few months from now.

> Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.

> Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.

From Jeff Bezos' Annual Letter (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312517...)

Seriously though, I think a lot of sales and leadership skills are unethical forms of manipulation. By this I mean covert or implicit triggers to change behavior. I'm fine with bargaining strategies, even aggressive ones - I don't enjoy bargaining but it's honestly self-interested conflict, if you see what I mean. Where it stops being ethical is in the deliberate use of ambiguity to create informational asymmetry.

In the example above, I'm very wary of propositions like 'we need to move on, will you take a gamble with me on this?' What exactly does the proposition of a gamble mean here? It has implications of win and loss, but the sense of urgency and the lack of clarity could mean that if the gamble is a win the proponent will take all the credit, whereas if it's a loss I'll be blamed for not having spotted the pitfalls.

Of course you can't infer too much from a single example out of context, but the idea of 'privatizing the gains and socializing the losses' is sadly widespread and I have encountered many decision-makers who seem to operate on such a principle.

Of course it's natural to want to take a decision and move on rather than get bogged down in many situations. When I'm in charge I like to do this by saying 'I want X, if it doesn't work I'll take responsibility and we'll do Y instead.' Obviously not a brilliant business strategy from many people's point of view :-)

I didn't remember it when I commented earlier, about 15 years ago I was in a job where boss walked in when I was with clients and asked me to proofread some ad copy. I did and made one minor correction (with a pen, I didn't talk about it). He called me into his office a few moments later and reamed me for 'undermining him in front of clients' because I had failed to understand that his intention was to show off rather than actually have me proofread the copy. He became so abusive (threatening violence and so on) that I quit on the spot.

tl;dr don't ask an open-ended question if what you actually want is validation of your decision.

It's called 'disagree and commit', wherein you can disagree with the direction the leader has decided to go in, but still commit to following direction.

This is opposed to 'disagree and dig your heels in' which is the default expectation. Or 'disagree and implement poorly'.

Here's a juicy real-world example. I used to work at a publicly traded Fortune 500 tech company. My boss' boss called us into a meeting to see a pitch deck he was planning to show to the executive team.

He'd done a survey that showed we should completely change the way we monitized our product. We would slash the price of our bread and butter product and charge more for add-ons. His survey showed that respondents really liked our add-on products, so it should be possible to make more money this way.

Our team worked on add-on products, so that was nice to hear. His survey validated our opinion that we were doing good work and the company should pay more attention to us. However something in the back of my brain said that his survey didn't add up. I asked him some questions about his methodology and discovered a big problem.

He only contacted people who had made money by using our add-on products. Roughly half of users didn't earn a penny, and he was ignoring those people in his survey. That would have dramatically lowered the satisfaction numbers in his survey.

I brought it up and he got very angry. He insisted that he'd conducted the survey correctly, and he didn't consider non-money-makers to be real customers. Several engineers chimed in and said I was right; he'd biased his sample and this survey wasn't accurate. He got even angrier and so we dropped it.

He brought it to the executives and they loved it. They completely changed the monitization system for the whole company. Within a year revenue had collapsed. It was so bad than many investors accused management of actively trying to hurt revenue. At least 5 class action lawsuits were launched over our rapidly declining stock price. Most of the executives were forced out by the board, and the company was acquired for a fraction of its former value.

I had a chance to stop all of this during that meeting, and I didn't. I let my boss' boss intimidate me into dropping it, and I can't help but feel like I'm partially to blame for everything that happened after.

He was a smart person, and generally someone I enjoyed being around. The problem is that he didn't have a science background and didn't understand how to create a controlled study. He also didn't understand the concept of statistical significance. Some of the engineering team did understand these things, but he dismissed our feedback. The result was a disaster.

There are lots of times where intelligent, informed, well-meaning people cannot come to an agreement on something important, and at some point, someone has to make a decision and everyone else should get on board with making it successful (this is hard - I've been in situations where a decision was made I didn't disagree with and it is against human nature to work hard on something you don't agree with - but the alternative is worse).

There is a lot of subtlety in making that approach successful, though, which probably will get lost on a lot of people. If this is always unidirectional (from the manager) or is wielded too bluntly, then yes, it is manipulative and is really worse than just flatly saying "I'm the boss, do what I say". You'll note that even Bezos himself is on the other end of "disagree and commit", though.

If you're offering funeral services, for example, even the world's cutest cartoon skeleton might not be an appropriate logo element. Your HN bia says 'builds software for chemical diagnosis' - sounds like your target demo is doctors and hospitals but I'm just guessing. I presume you wish to be different from other firms competing in the same market, but different isn't always better.

In short... can you compare the success of top products who feature a character in their logo and top products which do not. e.g which one maximizes the probability of a 'unicorn'.

I could...what are you offering in return? Right now it sounds like you want other people to do stuff for you for free so you can get what you want, which isn't a very compelling come-on. That might be why everyone is taking your designer's side instead of yours, hm?

>In my opinion having the character in the logo is crucial to the marketing. How do I persuade her that we must do this?

These statements seem to conflict with each other.

Taste is highly subjective, but your designer is a specialist in visual communication and literally sees the world in a different way from how you do.

Now, since you _already have a designer_... How about let them do their job and if there is poor response or if the employee is twiddling their thumbs at some point you can ask them to make the version you want.

I have long since lost track of the number of times a small startup, which finally got some funding, hired experienced senior employees at the request of their investors and proceeded to ignore everything those new employees recommended. This applies to everything from design to devops to running the reception desk.

You should take this as a cautionary tale: http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/2/10898762/uber-ceo-travis-ka...

> Kalanick is not a designer... Yet he refused to entrust the rebranding process to someone else. This was an unusual decision, on his part. When overhauling the identify of their company, most CEOs hire experts—branding agencies that specialize in translating corporate values into fonts and colors—or assign the task to an in-house design team. Not Kalanick. For the past three years, he’s worked alongside Uber design director Shalim Amin and a dozen-or-so other folks, hammering out ideas from a poorly ventilated space they call the War Room. Along the way, he studied up on concepts ranging from kerning to color palettes. "I didn’t know any of this stuff," says Kalanick. "I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good."

It doesn't seem like design/marketing is your area of expertise, yet you are trying to push someone who is more experienced in that area to follow your vision, which you don't really have any good validation for (hence the reason you are asking here) - that doesn't seem like very good leadership to me.

You are still building a product - is it worth expending this much time, energy, and conflict with your designer over something that most of us think is pretty trivial? Is your product in a good enough state that you have the luxury of fighting over something like this?

People would also often reference the bird, because of the connection that birds "tweet".

I can't say if they used the bird extensively in their documentation and backend tools, but that's where it's more likely to have been playfully included since their frontend was always pretty simple and to the point.

[1] https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/larger/pu...