Aug 15, 01:56
And back, Hydra, lost in translation
Back with lots of rants, lots of new experiments, News and dots and lines updates. Let’s get rollin’. In the last three weeks I had to visit Dubai more than seven times. And every time I did, I looked at Hydra Properties adverts and kept thinking who’d make such an awful English slogan translated from an Arabic s-lang, yet a cool Arabic slogan. “الفكرة في التميز” is the Arabic slogan—meaning “It’s about being different”. The English slogan is “The idea of being different” which is a word-by-word translation of the Arabic slogan.
So everytime I go down to Dubai I get to pick on some logo or some advert. Outta’ hand. It’s so easy to spot and reverse-engineer a logo design. Here’s the scenario with Hydra, 90% probability of being right!
The Scenario
Hydra has no real image to portray in the market, being a late entrant in the properties market, being lost among non-freehold rules in Abu Dhabi and the lack of real launches shows the lack of orderly organized PR campaigns and Ad campaigns, which brings me back to the logo.
The logo gets roots from a business plan mission statement. One of the founders keeps on pushing the envelope using those words so it gets sticky. When the time comes for going visual, the Arabic slogan needs to get an English face, but, well, it got translated by an Arabic designer(with really no know-how about English copy writing) who wanted to flex some muscles and show sophistication. So it goes like “The idea of being different”.
Now in the properties and development world, ideas can’t stand for nothing. Offerings do! I’m so in love with the way Schon properties came out, it’s about what you’re actually adding to the stack of crowded people hanging out of the bandwagon.
All so-not-thought-of.
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