Re-brand marketing consultants:
Blow torch and a wire coat-hanger bent into the word "Parasite".
Oldham murders owl with whalesong
Oldham Council has failed to follow its own motto - "Sapere Aude", or "dare to be wise" in the local dialect - and has spunked £100k on a couple of circles and its own name. That new Oldham logo in full Yup, the consultants behind the radical rebrand must have worn out a few whalesong CDs brainstorming their way to the new …
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Thursday 17th April 2008 15:32 GMT Spleen
At least it's not a Consignia spiral
"...what we have been hearing from people is some out-of-date, negative views about Oldham as a place and as a council. So we felt we needed to do something about that."
How about picking up the bins when you're supposed to, keeping the streets safe, repairing the roads and giving any money you don't need back to the taxpayers? You never know, that might change some views.
Scum.
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Thursday 17th April 2008 15:32 GMT Al Baird
Council Rebrands
Surely there is some issue that councils rebranding just costs too much, what with the cost of the marketing consultants, then the signage on village names, council vans, offices, roundabouts, letterheads, forms stationery, pens, keyfobs, passes, websites, and I am sure I am only scratching the surface. Can you guess who pays for this
Just as well we have a wealth of services that are well funded as we seem to have all this spare money around just gathering dust.. no wait...
Kirklees (Huddersfield) have gone through exactly this process.. looking forward to seeing the final cost
Mines the one with the soapbox underneath...
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Thursday 17th April 2008 16:11 GMT Alexis Vallance
Usual media guff
Usual misreporting by the media (the MEN in this case). Logos do not cost £100k. It may cost £100k to print material and relaunch websites, but about £10k of that it creating the actual brand.
Unless you want to spend £10k and have a pretty logo on a piece of paper, there's no point. If you're not to going to implement the brand it's pointless.
If there's one place that does need rebranding, it's Wythenshawe and it's cracking strapline:
"Still Wyth-it after 30 years"
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Thursday 17th April 2008 18:06 GMT Spleen
Re: Alexis Vallance
Activity made necessary by pointless activity is also pointless activity. If you kick me down the stairs then both the immediate bruise on my back *and* the ensuing damage to my limbs, ribcage and head are your fault.
Every penny of that £100k remains a total waste. No misreporting.
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Thursday 17th April 2008 18:08 GMT mark
Usual crap
Typical Oldham Council.
No money to do anything that matters, but can find 100k to blow on a crap logo. They also get the bonus of the publicity, declaring to the world the extent of their utter crapness. It wouldn't surprise me if the consultancy firm is owned by a close friend of our glorious leader. Every other service is.
I've long said we should give the town to the RAF as a bombing range.
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Thursday 17th April 2008 20:20 GMT Peter Labrow
As a professional designer myself...
...I can't say I'm in the wrong game, just charging the wrong amount. A good designer might charge (say) £80 per hour, so that means this took 1250 hours or approx 166 days. However, I'd say even an average designer could have done this in a day max, 'thinking time' included. Perhaps they did and this is just an example of 'value-based pricing'. In any event, I want to hire the salesperson from the design agency who negotiated the price. He's definitely very good value.
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Thursday 17th April 2008 20:20 GMT wayne
typical oldham council
here's another way oldham council wasted money
they recently errected a huge banner that covers the hole of one side of civic centre it's 15 stories tall (2oo ft or 61 meters)
first off they didnt even have planning permission
2nd the picture on this poster looks like a giant cock!
if you look here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Civic_Centre_at_Oldham.png)
the poster covers the whole of the left side
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Thursday 17th April 2008 20:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
I know the next steps...
The "higher ups" in the shiny suits will have allocated a nice sum, say £25k, off the top of central council funding, for the Town Hall letter heads, signs etc. to be changed, (scrapping any old stock).
Then they'll send a tough e-mail to all the frontline services ( i.e. the people who actually do work with the public) tinstructing them that they must also stop using the old signs, letter heads etc. immedaltely.
But these services won't get any new funding for this, so they'll have to find this cost out of their existing budgets. Which sounds very frugal and economical with public money, except of course that then this has to come out of the resources they need to do the job.
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Thursday 17th April 2008 23:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Circle of unity...
"The main picture that people will see is a circle. It's a circle of unity, it's about oneness, it's about saying, 'We're about many places but one destination,' for example."
Indeed, a circle does only have one destination... and that's back where you started.
Paris 'cos I bet her circle leads somewhere nicer than Oldham
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Friday 18th April 2008 05:02 GMT david
Never use a circle --
You have to get the aspect ratio exactly right. I can see the distortion on most screens: most people can if they look. But the real problem is that you have the same problem on paper.
They will have to look at every single item they ever send out for printing to make sure that the circle is 'round enough' on the final product.
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Friday 18th April 2008 05:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Looks to me like one circle...
a white circle on a blue background, representing the pride of Oldham, a tubular bandage. Also symbolising healing and unity. But as this is a commercial product that can't be seen to be endorsed with public money, the whalesong explanation is required for consumption outside the town.
Rick
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Friday 18th April 2008 05:02 GMT yeah, right.
makes sense
Looks like a target for "here be a sucker" painted by the "marketers" who sold them this pile of shite.
Can someone PLEASE institute the death penalty for bureaucrats who prove themselves to be utterly stupid? Because thanks to workplace accident prevention, it's getting harder and harder to arrange for Darwin Awards for these utter wastes of space. Just think of the millions upon millions of quid that could be saved if these complete morons could be erased from the gene pool?
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Friday 18th April 2008 05:44 GMT PH
Okay......
Sheesh! Guys, I hate to rain on another pint-sized think-fest but if any of you worked in the industry you'd know that the cost always covers far more than simply 'making a logo'.
It's like you're confusing the cost of an international flight with the cost of the paper ticket in your hand; confusing the cost of your software with the cost of the DVD it comes on; the cost of a wedding with... well, you get the idea.
Branding is not a synonym for a "making a logo".
P.S. I don't have any connection with any of the businesses in the story.
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Friday 18th April 2008 07:47 GMT Mark SPLINTER
Sorry, me and PH know what we are talking about
Branding is:
a) Not easy
b) Not quick
As PH says, you are being morons. The real issue here is how a council was talked into / desperately trying to spend so much public money rebranding. They could have got it cheaper, or not done it at all. They could have rebranded to a style that doesn't already look dated, to save future costs. They could have used the freaking town owl mascot. They could have smoked less joss stick.
But all of that only shows incompetence, greed, and masturbation by the council and the consultants involved. It does not prove anything about the concept of rebranding as a whole.
Ask Nike how much value they got out of their Swoosh, and how much they paid for it. Ask Skype if it was easy grabbing ridiculous amounts of mindshare in a market occupied by giants. Picture the golden arches of a certain hamburger company, you can can't you? Clear as day. Only takes 10 minutes to draw it, but does that mean it takes 10 minutes to design it? You don't know, because you're a moron.
This thread is full of the kind of idiots who look at a Jackson Pollock and say "faaaakin ell, my 4 year old daughter could do that wiv her own vomit, fuksaiiik"
I could maybe copy out 5,000 lines of code in a day, if you provide coffee and biscuits. So shall we start laughing at applications that cost more than £50 to produce from scratch?
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Friday 18th April 2008 08:19 GMT goggyturk
A slap in the face to the Fuerza Aérea Argentina
I hope they realise that they've stolen this symbol from another organisation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Air_Force
This could be the bloodiest trademark dispute in history...
Black helicopters, because the Argentine rebranding consultants will be landing in Oldham very, very soon
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Friday 18th April 2008 08:19 GMT Daniel
@PH
Does PH stand for Paris Hilton? Just wondering because she'd probably use this kind of logic too.
It's like polishing a turd for 100k - of course the cost isn't just for the polished turd, it's for the polish, the cloth, the polisher's hourly rate, consultancy & focus groups to derive the optimum polish type etc. Doesn't change the fact that it's still polishing a turd.
Like a previous poster mentioned, the money would have been better spent getting the bins emptied on time, litter cleared, better policing and so on ad infinitum. Then the perceived value of the 'brand' might actually stand a chance of going up instead of hitting rock bottom and starting digging.
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Friday 18th April 2008 08:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Mark Splinter
Go on then please explain to the people who are watching the kids doing graffiti because they are bored as the council can't afford to run the youth centre, or the guy that goes a pisser when his bike goes down a pothole, where the hundred thousand went.
Why do they need to spend 100K "rebranding", regardless if it means repainting vans, doing new letter heads, having action days, piss ups down the pub for the thought shower or whatever.
I don't give a shit, what my councils logo looks like. I don't suddelny wake up, find the streets covered in litter and go, F**K if only they had a new pretty logo then I'd be a bit less pissed off.
it's our money and I don't want to see it spent on making a letter head look nice!
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Friday 18th April 2008 08:40 GMT michael
my issue
is not with the stupid logo I am shure my company has spent more on worse logos it is that fact that is was a town councle who keep complaning they have no mony for things that is doing it if my comp gose bust form wasting mony with rebranding it is just it's employes who lose if the councle over spends it is the entire town who loses
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Friday 18th April 2008 08:40 GMT TeeCee
@Mark S
Branding yes. Rebranding, like this, also requires:
3) A complete and total waste of time and money.
Your analogies from the Business world are utter cobblers.
Firstly because Oldham council doesn't have to sell itself, the revenue it gets comes from a captive audience, taxpayers. I can't see that any businesses thinking about relocating are going to be swayed into doing so by the local council having a cheesier logo than the alternatives!
Secondly, because I can't see any of the successful brands you mention having a sudden rush of insanity and coughing up gobs of cash to dump the swoosh*, golden arches etc. and replace them with some unimaginative shite like this.
*Swoosh - who the f*** thought of calling it that? Boiling in oil is too good for some people.
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Friday 18th April 2008 08:57 GMT Neil Jones
Change for the Sake of it
I love it when organisations do away with long-established branding, tradition being the one genuine and often priceless thing that can't be bought at any cost, and replace it with something modern and up to the minute that within 5 years will look "so 2008" (or in this case "so 2002" already). So have heart, people of Oldham, you'll only be stuck with this for a couple of years, then maybe you can buy the rights to the London 2012 logo when they've finished with it.
As an aside, I can't wait till they extend the PR attempts to modernise the Royal Family to include a replacement of the Royal Coat of Arms. Maybe rather than use the College of Arms they could run a competition on Blue Peter?
And finally, thanks for reminding me to top up my Oyster Card.
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