I’m presently at a hotel, and I’ve found myself impressed with the Wi-Fi here. The signal strength is okay and the speed is adequate, but that’s not what’s standing out. It’s the branding.
I’ve seen all manners of SSIDs since Wi-Fi became commonplace in hotels, from “Free Wifi” to “[hotel name here],” but in my experience, this Howard Johnson location is truly singular… and perplexing to me.
The hotel offers multiple wireless access points. I’m guessing this is for better coverage, but they decided to give each one a different name. The names aren’t anything predictable, like hojo1, hojo2, either.
I’m impressed that the management actually took the time to integrate feel-good corporate messages into each access point’s SSID. Using tech to communicate thoughts in nontraditional ways is certainly relevant to my interests. However, picking a different slogan for each AP not only seems technically sloppy, but makes for an awkward mish-mash of old and new company taglines. Also, how am I supposed to know the AP I’m connecting to isn’t an evil twin? It’d be pretty trivial for someone to throw together something like hojolovesyou and have its potential for malice be imperceptible next to the other goofy networks.
My concerns over the wireless amenities are mostly theoretical, since my tethered Android phone has me adequately covered when it comes to Internet access. My use of the free Wi-Fi is limited to consuming to high-bandwidth content that would make my currently-EDGE connection choke. (What’s more, as a Linux user — varoom! —much of what a theoretical attacker could do, outside of MITM, isn’t really a concern to me.)
When I was growing up, this was the Burger King logo. (I also walked uphill to school in the South Florida snow, both ways. Kids these days.) It’s pretty simple, right? The words represented the meat, between a couple of buns. To whom was that not abundantly clear that the logo is a burger?
Here’s another example of a logo I didn’t fully understand or appreciate. For the record, I wasn’t a Milwaukee Brewers fan, but at the age of four or five (and thanks to a friend’s father) I found myself with a huge collection of contemporary baseball cards. Again, until I was much older, all I saw in this logo was a stylized baseball and glove… which to a child, seems a perfectly appropriate logo for a baseball team. And your average sports-team logo is on the literal side.
