Who's To Blame When Branding Goes Wrong?

Many have asked for my opinion on the branding ‘mistake’ made by the Australian PMs department with the logo created for their volunteer-based organisation created as part of its?equal opportunity initiative to "work towards the vision of a more inclusive and diverse workplace".

As a Neurobranding specialist, I can confirm that the brain “sees” brands by the shape, image, colour and tone.

It appears that the logo shape was set to follow a range of department initiatives, with similarly shaped icons.

However, in my opinion, given the many other options that must be available to create an iconic logo in the same 'family' as the existing logo framework, whoever designed this logo either had insufficient time, knowledge or insight or they knew exactly what they were doing and what it represented and how our brains would translate it, and, probably to their horror, their 'straw dog' concept got accepted.

Mistake or otherwise, most agree that the shape and iconography can be seen as breasts or genitalia.

Many women have responded to the logo with phrases such as "shocking", "offensive"?and "brutally inappropriate"...

Worse than the image it portrays, for it to get approval is, in my opinion, a massive error in judgement and very questionable, especially as it was entirely an internal job.

At a time when there are growing political concerns about how women are treated within parliament and in the wider workplace, it's especially poor decision making, and all over it equates to very bad reputational damage to a party and leadership that is already losing faith with women voters.

Karen Crombie, founder and editor and chief at Exact Editing, said that the logo "sends the message that women’s issues aren’t important enough to have that care spent on them", and that "spending the money and thinking that this result was acceptable" indicated how the PMs office and department heads are out of touch.

She emphasised that she felt the branding was "clumsy at best and deeply offensive at worst" and she thought it was especially poor considering "brands these days were a lot more sophisticated, well researched and thought through, especially by those who have the money to hire experienced professionals for these designs".

It is of course more than ironic that the department the logo was created for is focused on women in the workplace and Deborah Parsons of Your Life Your Way, an organisation helping women create personal and financial success agreed that it couldn't have come at a worse time "It’s appalling and yet another stuff up from this Government with regards to women."

Of course, it's not the first time someone has got their branding completely wrong, but it does tend to occur regularly with organisations and government departments, perhaps because they use internal resources instead of external expertise.?

Mindest Coach Michele Gennoe pointed out that the poor judgement used for the Women's Network branding is "akin to the recent revamp of the Made In Australia logo which was criticised for closely resembling the covid virus shape".

This similar lack of good judgement has since had another update to fix the issue, but at $10million how much money was squandered?

In my opinion, and I've worked in world-leading branding and advertising agencies, that's an obscene amount of money to spend on branding, especially do for an organisation founded on helping small Australian businesses, charging them as members to stand out from the crowd, yet their own branding is so wrong.

Of course, many questioned, why rebrand, what was wrong with the old logo? It carried the Australian colour scheme of green and old and the iconic image of a kangaroo, synonymous with Australia, but obviously, someone thought they could do better...

How on earth did the discussions go around this?

..."Our brand is too obvious...Oh, I know, let's try to be more relevant and make it look like a virus?"...

What sort of discussion was had around the Women's Network branding...

..."it needs to be cigar-shaped like the rest of them, I know, let's draw a dick and balls...tee hee..."

Perhaps now, with these two most recent branding blunders, the bigger question is, who decides which logo is right?

Is there a real risk that internal resources, who might be too close to it to "see the wood for the trees", are not the best to handle branding, especially when there are a plethora of branding specialists, designers and identity consultants who would do a far better job of it?

Of course, everyone will say, but that would cost too much.

But can you really afford to stuff up your brand image and suffer the negative PR and damage to your reputation, losing all credibility by not asking an expert to help?

Lauren Clemett is a Keynote speaker, International award-winning Neurobranding specialist and best selling author with over 25 years brand management experience. Lauren shares how to overcome overwhelm and get a clear direction to make marketing professional and business services a walk in the park!

www.yourbrandtruenorth.com