Sociocorpus

Every month, a few of us meet up for dinner and geek conversation. We call it the Valley in Christchurch. Well, this month we were joined by a couple of actual valley guys, Peter Weck and Hans Brough from Simply Hired. They’re nice guys and we had an interesting conversation: interesting because it was mainly about us, and Christchurch and New Zealand. But we did find out a little about them, and to express their gratitude and generosity, they gave us tee shirts.

I am thinking about branding at OnlineGroups.Net right now, so I took particular interest in what they had on their tee shirts. I was impressed by the simplicity of the message: if you hate your job, then you’ll love our search. I figured that anyone would get that message, even without the graphics, and that even without the words, the graphics would get most the message across, too. I decided to test this with a four year old. I showed her the back of the tee shirt and asked “in this picture, who would you rather be, the elephant or the person?”.

“The elephant” she replied. Horrified, I asked why. “Because the elephant gets to stand on the stool”. Darn, that makes sense. Determined to salvage some dignity for us adults, I asked the same question about the picture on the front of the shirt. This time, she preferred to be the person. Why? “Because the person gets to hold the shovel.”