Think
Sunday, February 15th, 2009A very good friend of mine has the following as his IM display image: “‘Your stupid’? … My stupid what?”
It’s pretty clear that if the one communicating the statement were only to think, he/she would’ve added an apostrophe between U and R, and the letter E at the end of the first word. Back in high school, when weaving the web meant pouring into hundreds of lines of bare HTML that rendered very simple interfaces, I got the chance to design my alma mater’s (then-called) Computer Education Department’s site. Having a penchant for branding and marketing, I looked for something that could iconify the Department’s vis/mis.
I chanced upon IBM’s one-word slogan - Think. At that time, I didn’t know that “Think” went all the way back to Watson Sr. All I knew was that it was being used to campaign IBM’s resurrection as led by Lou Gerstner. This inspired me to propose “Think Again” to be the Department’s theme — almost a decade before National Geographic started using the phrase in and for its branding. My proposed branding even had a graphical element — an abstract illustration of Auguste Rodin’s Thinker, like the replica found at Stanford.
Fast forward to 2009, we see IBM going back to its roots, to its core, in its campaign to change the world. One of the videos I stumbled into that I really love is the following.
Think.
