2,190 Days Later…
Andy Tarczon, Founding Partner
April 5, 2010
In today’s economy the hot term is entrepreneurship –individuals having the will, the drive, the desire, and ultimately accepting the risk of succeeding or failing. It is about creating the small businesses that are the economic backbone of our country. And while I write these lofty ambitions, it’s still hard for me to believe that yesterday marked six years since Michael Greeson and I took that challenge and created The Diffusion Group.
2,190 days later, we have you to thank… Today, I thought we might look back at our evolution through the eyes of our graphics team…
April 4th, 2004. It all started with the S-Curve.
Geoffrey Moore wrote a classic on technology marketing called “Crossing The Chasm.” The book presented the concepts of the S-curve and different segments of consumer adoption - early adopters, early mass market, late mass market, and laggards. What wasn’t cited in the original book was that the framework being presented was developed by Everett Rogers, who in 1962 released “Diffusion of Innovations.” In starting The Diffusion Group, we wanted to pay homage to Rogers’ work and the importance of bringing new innovations to the consumer market.
But the innovation we focused on was not general technology, it was the impact of home networks and broadband. It was about the services that were going to be enabled in the digital home. At the time, home networks were just about to jump into the early mass market. Now, for the first time ever, we are revealing our first attempt at a logo…
(TDG Logo Concept, 2004)
Don’t worry, we never used it. Some of you will notice that it had five segments instead of four, an error by the graphics designer. The rest of you will notice it was just plain ugly.
Instead we went with simple words:
(TDG Logo 2004)
Sure it wasn’t pretty, but there was a deep meaning in this for us. First, it was important to us that the firm be named for our beliefs. We intentionally opted not to name it after an individual analyst, an often popular move for the research industry. Instead the two fonts and different sizes emphasized our focus on Diffusion.
We believe there is a struggle that occurs between the people who do market research folk and the people who work on products – a struggle with analyzing the big picture versus executing tactical plans. Michael and I had long pondered how to be relevant to all concerned and how to implement some of those ideas. We set out to do just that – unifying experienced analysts, consultants, and researchers under one banner all here to help generate the numbers and apply them to our clients business planning needs. The concept of Diffusion helped express that approach. It was a core principle that drove our work. It’s why we started the firm…
Enter the Water Drops....
As we moved into 2005, any time you spoke about diffusion or searched for a graphic, inevitably water droplets entered the equation. Internally, we could not get away from the concept that a simple idea could ripple and change both technology and the consumer experience. We even had a spectacular animation on our site (which has thankfully been lost to the world). Thus we updated our logo to reflect this concept.
(TDG Logo 2005)
Yep, few people understood the graphic – somehow thinking it was a Batman styled logo.
The Digital Home is about Media.
As our research and client work progressed, we realized that the digital home story was really about video and media across the home network. We were starting to focus on these media usages and a new hot topic: IPTV. Our first report on the space came was released in January 2005 and was written by Herve Utheza (now president of RCDb).
The report focused on service providers, but it was quickly becoming apparent that IP would be the delivery medium to all devices both in and outside of the home. IP video would fuel TV, PC, and mobile devices. The Three Screen concept. And since the last logo had missed the mark, we thought we’d try again. This time, we included three ripples – one for each of the screens where video would be viewed.
(TDG Logo 2006)
We stuck with this logo for several years, as we felt it presented an accurate view of our firm and our work. What’s funny is that it really did – it said that we were more focused on the content than the pretty graphics of our name. And, frankly, we were too swamped doing other things to think about it.
So we ignored the fact that it didn’t scale well, that it pixilated when shrunk in our reports, and still wasn’t that all that pretty.
2008: Going Social
Upon our 4th anniversary as a company, we began to think very heavily about the concept of ‘community.’ We began talking to our clients about how they wanted to interact with research, how they wanted to interact with us and with each other. We knew video experiences would be heavily influenced by social media – whether sharing clips through Facebook, building social recommendation engines (such as Jinni.com), or watching in a virtual party (Netflix Party on XBOX).
So we tried a grand experiment, to build a complete research site on a dedicated social media platform. We set out to simplify everything, to create a better interface, better analytics on how our clients use our research and our website, we implemented not only our own community, but embraced other networks, seeking more interactions with our clients, and of course, a better looking site. Along with that site came a stunningly simple logo.
(TDG Logo 2008)
The Irony of TDG
In 2009, Colin Dixon, who has been with us since 2005, became the third partner in TDG. We sometimes joke that TDG no longer means The Diffusion Group, instead Tarczon, Dixon, and Greeson. But the joke has to end there, TDG has always been about more than any individual (that, and we have no desire to change the company name when we promote our next partner).
The markets we study are ever evolving. And as a company, so must we. From what we study, to how we deliver our research, to the companies we help enter this space - we are constant teachers and constant learners. With evolution comes change. And even if it’s just a logo, we firmly believe it represents everything we do. Which takes us to our final logo. Our graphics team opted to flatten the logo by removing the shadows. We’ve opted to bring back our roots and reinserted The Diffusion Group.
(TDG Logo as it stands today... well, at least for now)
So on this, our 2,191st day, I want to say thank you to our members, our clients, our employees, our industry partners, our friends in the media, our vendors, and everyone who been part of not just TDG, but the consumer video experience, we want to say thank you. You’ve allowed us the honor of being a voice for this industry, the opportunity to be part of so many new and exciting products, and the responsibility to accurately analyze these emerging digital media markets.
ShareThis