The Stickers vs. the Logo

Uber-techie and uber-blogger Robert Scoble recently posted  pictures of two of his laptops online and they are wall-to-walled with stickers. If his computers had wheels they’d be NASCAR cars (except the brands on Scoble’s PCs aren’t mega ones like Pennzoil, UPS or Wonder Bread, but much smaller ones like Google Sketchup, Amazon Web Services and DataPortability.org…  also, Scoble says these groups don’t pay him “for placement” they’re  companies/ products/ organizations/ ideas that turn him on.) He’ll probably keep stickering… he says is Lenovo laptop is still pristine.

Here are Scoble’s computers, a Mac and a Dell (not that you’de know, of course… the logos are long-buried by the stickers).

If you click the pictures and link over to Flickr you can read little popup messages about each sticker–plus read loads of  comments including ones with pictures of others’ laptops and stickers.

Stickers are an increasingly big part of digital culture. They let people personalize their “hardware”
and express themselves.

And given that laptops are often open in public (cafes, airports, schools, work) the outside of laptops are valuable real estate. Laptop manufacturers have figured this out and have made their logos much more prominent on the outside of their machines.

Many people actually use stickers to “unbrand” their laptops by covering over the manufacturer’s logo. Some laptop makers now design the outside of their machines as full-scale works of art (with their logo of course) which are less likely to be stickered over.

If you’re a laptop manufacturer you want to mean enough to people to not be covered up. And if you’re anyone else, you want to mean enough to warrant a sticker.

How do you mean enough? A’ha that’s the sticky  part 🙂