Branding is a promise, a kizuna of trust; consider Duolingo's missteps.

Three hundred days have passed since I started using the language app Duolingo. It has been almost a year since I made it a habit to learn English every day, either early in the morning when I wake up or late at night before bedtime. Learning is no different from playing games. The cool word would be gamification.

The app is claimed to be the number one language app used by people all over the world. The content features a green owl as the main character and other familiar characters.

In terms of content, there is an endless series of basic-level questions. It probably won't help you prepare for TOEIC or other exams. I can skip learning levels, but there is no need to rush ahead, so what I am still learning is ‘past tense’. I am embarrassed to say that it is junior high school English. Nevertheless, it's a well-made app because it's fun to learn.

However, the frequency of use has dropped dramatically. My motivation to open the app and learn is rapidly declining.

The reason why motivation is low is because the icon has a funny face. It looks shabby, like it has a cold. This is not the first time the app has had a funny face. The same thing happened in April, when he had a wrinkled old man's face. It was very disheartening.

This funny face icon is apparently a strategy of the development and management company. Frankly speaking, however, this kind of unpleasant treatment is not funny and inevitably gives the impression of ‘harassment’ of the user.

I believe that this impression of ‘harassment’ is probably correct. We would like to consider what this means.

One of the features of Duolingo is that, as you continue to use it, there are review question events, and when you complete the test, the icon changes to an orange burning icon. Also, if you continue to use the free version, you will periodically be given access to a trial of the paid version as a special gift: during the three-day trial period, the icon will change to the SUPER icon of the paid version.

In other words, the UX (User eXperience) of changing icons is used to stimulate purchasing behavior. The funny face icon is a negative pattern of icon changes that encourage free users to pay.

It is easy to guess from this specification that, in essence, it is a silent message or pressure to ‘pay up if you don't like the funny face icon’.

To use a more positive marketing expression, it is a campaign to stimulate up-selling (switching to a higher version).

The AI-powered version of the black owl seems to have been released, and adverts for it have become more frequent. Animations have also been added to record the number of consecutive correct answers to five consecutive questions and the number of consecutive days. Minor updates appear to have been made.

What kind of company is the developer? I was interested to find out, and learnt that the company had laid off 10 per cent of its workforce in January this year. Apparently, the company is trying to accelerate its response to cutting-edge technology and reduce work costs by delegating translation work to AI. The company is making an aggressive turnaround at a time when high-tech companies are cutting jobs.

In other words, a lot of development money was spent. It may be a situation where the company is keen to recoup its investment. Despite this, upselling, or in other words, inducing users to switch from the free version to the paid version, may not be going well.

Regardless of the company's situation, from the standpoint of free users, the funny face icon is nothing but harassment. The harassment has been going on for about half a month now. I want it to stop. I'm fed up with it.

’Don't just use it for free, charge me! Hey, I'm talking about you! It's your fault I'm like this, what are you going to do about it?’ says a snotty, sweaty owl with a funny face. Is it a stickler, no, an auditory hallucination. Is it a tough development situation, so tough that the icon is sick? Is that why he is so persistent? Is it the company or the character, or both, whose illnesses do not heal?

I also thought about it this way. For app developers and operators, the increase in free users is great for increasing the number of downloads, but in reality, ‘free riders’ put pressure on servers and other operating costs. In fact, this may be a problem for them. Therefore, Duolingo developers and operators may have wanted to eliminate free riders in a negative way, even at the risk of damaging their brand value.

Duolingo wants free riders to cancel their using, but once they have registered, cannot ask them to do so. Accordingly they says, ‘We appreciate that you continue to use the service for free, but can you please quit now? It's hard for us. It costs us a lot of money’. Therefore, a system of harassment is created to make free riders want to quit on their own. Make them feel uncomfortable and kick them out. It is the same as lay off. It is insidious.

Duolingo was originally a simple learning app like other language apps, but seems to have grown significantly by adopting character development. Some articles highlighted it as a branding success story. However, I'm not so sure about the development of trying to drop out free users with funny faces.

In the first place, is it a good idea for companies in the education business to take such a user-exclusionary approach?

Duolingo's funny face campaign is probably a blunder in the app's branding.

Perhaps these funny tricks were appreciated because it was highly rated as the number one language app. In apps and games, hidden tricks, called Easter eggs, are fun, and special specifications and presentations for seasonal events such as April Fool's Day, Halloween and Christmas can increase fan satisfaction.

However, I personally think the Duolingo funny face icon is a blunder in branding development caused by the arrogance of a hubristic language app company. It's so transparently intended to harass people in order to drive them to the paid version that it's just offensive. It's so disgusting that I've quarantined this guy to the corner of my phone screen.

Incidentally, a search on the internet shows that Duolingo has a rating of 4.7 on Google Play and 4.5 on the Apple app store. It will be interesting to see how the ratings fluctuate in the future. However, even if the rating drops, if the number of free users leaving the app increases dramatically and the server load is resolved, the kick-out campaign will be a great success. There could be a strategy of taking the profit over the fame, it is the users who have taken advantage of this strategy.

Having said this, what I really wanted to write in this essay is not a criticism of Duolingo. It is about branding.

It is said that branding originated from branding a cow. The purpose was to distinguish the cow from others by branding it on the back, saying that this cow is a good cow from our farm.

I once studied branding, and I forget what book it was (I think it was Brand Mindset by Dune Knapp from Shoeisha), but I was deeply impressed to learn that branding is a promise made between the producer and the consumer, a kizuna of trust. Kizuna is a Japanese word for relationship, producer(or product)-customer linkages. I was deeply affected by this.

When we think of brands, we tend to think of superficial images, such as creating a cool logo, devising a name, or using high-end materials. However, this is not the case. The essence of a brand is formed ‘between’ the creator and the buyer.

There is nothing between things and people. That is certainly true. That is precisely why the secret of branding is to create the value of a ‘kizuna of trust’ where there is none.

It could be said that Buddhism calls ‘Shiki soku ze ku‘, form is emptiness. It is precisely because there is nothing between things and people that everything exists. That is why a brand opens up infinite value and possibilities. Value is created beyond the cost of the material.

When we think about Duolingo's funny face after reviewing the basics of branding, trust collapsed when it made people think that this company would do anything to harass free users in order to get them to pay for it. Kizuna disappeared without a trace.

At least in my mind, the app's rating plummeted. Branding that exists where there was nothing to begin with disappears very quickly. Because nothing was there to begin with.

It's fine to playful with social networking posts. But a system that harasses fans who continue to use it, even if it is a free ride, is a betrayal of the user. And no matter how much trust you build up, it doesn't take long before it crumbles.

The same could be said for personal branding and personal branding.

Personal branding is not about wearing cool clothes, driving a luxury car, making tens of millions of dollars from stocks, having tens of thousands of followers or having that much traffic. It is about how well you can build a one-to-one relationship of trust with someone and whether you can maintain that relationship over the long term.

Therefore, an old man in a shopping street, a craftsman in a manufacturing business or a master of a long-established coffee shop may be much better at branding than an influencer who is pampered on the internet. However, even if they has built a brand of trust, trust will fall to the ground if he or she uses harassment and fraudulent profit-making mechanisms (marketing).

So, my trust in Duolingo has been damaged, but there doesn't seem to be any other good language app product out there, so I'm willing to keep using it for a while.

‘You may want the free ride to stop, but I'll keep using it’, It's my stance. Users who don't pay and are inactive are nothing but a hindrance. The most harassing presence for Duolingo may be me.

An interesting trend that I have recently noticed: a search on websites shows that there is now an increasing number of content explaining the technique of changing a strange Duolingo icon to a fake icon without permission and offering fake owl-designed icons as a ‘how to change a strange Duolingo icon to another icon’.

As long as development and management companies remain stubborn and continue to use funny-face icons, it is only natural that the need to change icons will increase.

There is nothing wrong with changing icon, whether on PC or smartphone. Duolingo is facing a crisis of icons being changed without permission. The icon might be changed from a funny-looking green owl to a Twitter blue bird, or something other than a bird. Shouldn't they urgently reflect on their blunders and change the course of their brand strategy?

Well, it's not for me as a free-rider user, to say, right?

＊Translated with DeepL.com (free version), and edited.

2024.09.14 Bw

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