Zomato takes a gamble. Changes logo, again.
Zomato, the popular restaurant discovery service which started from India has become an ace at taking gambles now. What has it done?
1) Zomato started from Gurgaon, grew quickly and it didn't wait to expand outside India. Since it's international foray in 2012, it has grown to be present in 22 countries now.
2) CEO Deepinder Goyal is not afraid of making big bets. In their latest funding round of $60 million, the company ended up using $52 million to acquire US based UrbanSpoon.
3) Zomato was in existence for more than six years and in the middle of last year, it decided to rebrand. Here's that story.
4) We had titled the "How Deepinder Goyal and Rameet Arora crafted a perfect rebranding story for Zomato" but it doesn't make much sense now because they've changed the logo. Yes, again.
Why again?
The following two pictures tell the story:
Yes, UrbanSpoon's magnitude made Zomato do a little bit of thinking and they didn't want to alienate the 40mn+ UrbanSpoon users. Deepinder Goyal writes,For us, this is a simple case of making sure that the transition (of merging Urbanspoon to Zomato) is the least painful for the most number of our users. We want to make sure that when we update the Urbanspoon app for millions of users, we don’t give them a new name and a new icon. Doing that could make it look like they installed the Zomato app by mistake, potentially leading to a large number of uninstalls.
For Zomato users, they get a new logo, but retain the name. Hopefully, that shouldn’t give us a large number of uninstalls (not much was lost when we moved to the Heart logo a couple of months ago).
Zomato has already begun to give the UrbanSpoon users a taste of the Zomato red by making changes on the website. These are some very tough questions Zomato is tackling and questions like these will always pop up because of some of the steps Zomato has taken:
Also, in Zomato's recent analyst call, Zomato conveyed the following things on the Urbanspoon acquisition:
-> Zomato should have paid less for UrbanSpoon
-> Phasing out UrbanSpoon brand is a short term v/s long term call
-> UrbanSpoon has been mainly acquired for Australia and Canada
But this change in logo has been mainly brought about to take care of the users in US (and thus competition with Yelp becomes important) and other areas UrbanSpoon was dominant in. This is a big gamble and a tough call and the team at Zomato knows it
By March, we hope to be in a position where Zomato users across the planet will be able to easily recognize this icon on their phones, and fire up the app to find restaurants lightning-quick. We understand this is going to be another change for all of you who have been using Zomato regularly; it’s also the most painful for us – the cost and effort of changing our logo everywhere across the world is humongous. But overall, we really hope we’ll be given another chance to familiarize ourselves with your home screens. We promise we won’t ask you to do this again for a long time to come!