Jeff Gets Upset … Me Too
I love it when creative whiz Jeff Brooks gets upset over the mind-boggling bad judgments nonprofits make — regarding names, logos, taglines, positioning and messaging — in the name of better branding.
The examples he comes up with, as in this post — Change your name at your own risk — are usually breathtaking. Virtually all of the time you have to agree with him. How could the execs at [ ] be so dumb?!
As I often write on the topic, I do believe that branding is a serious matter for nonprofits. But I tend to think about qualities like authenticity, donor perspective, and message consistency rather than name fonts and excessive navel-gazing.
So I had a genuine ‘Jeff moment’ when I saw this NY Times article regarding the following change the United Negro College Fund (U.N.C.F.) is making to its very, very, very well-known tagline (“tinkering” is what the NY Times called it):
From: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” (created in and penetrating consciousness since 1972!)
To: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste but a wonderful thing to invest in.”
Hats off to advertising agency Y&R for mucking up a perfectly suggestive, brief, memorable and straightforward tagline by adding extraneous words stating a conclusion that’s already obvious.
Whoever approved this change at the College Fund — and it would have to include the Board — you get the first Agitator ‘You Oughta Be Fired’ distinction we’ve bestowed since June 2011!
Do you agree, Jeff?
Tom
P.S. Sure, to support the change, Y&R commissioned a study to document that African-American college grads would out-earn and be better off by numerous measures than their high school grad counterparts (Hmmm. Y&R needed to freshly document that?!). But you know what, anyone moved emotionally to respond to UNCF’s appeals over the last 40+ years already ‘knew’ that in their heads. The new tagline extension is totally superfluous in terms of adding to the message or its intrinsic impact, but clearly made the team at Y&R feel better. Once they started down the ‘tinkering’ path, they were committed to making some change!
5 responses to “Jeff Gets Upset … Me Too”
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Can’t believe they’ve done this! And after I went to all this trouble to present their fantastic 1968 fundraising appeal at Once Upon I Wish I’d Thought of That in London the other week: http://www.sofii.org/node/1261
Hmph. 😉
Breathtaking! I use that as a great example all the time. How to destroy a brilliant tagline (and they probably got paid a fortune to do it).
After what seems like almost continuous changing tides in the branding and identity sea over at the Alzheimer’s Association in the last decade, I spied this last week (during the Anderson Cooper airing, no less): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqK1NEpNBic
The video really had me hooked until the last screen and it’s accompanying tagline: The Brains Behind Saving Yours.
Blech! Did they actually read that aloud before committing to it? Interestingly, it does not appear to have been adopted by the fundraising department or the chapters. Perhaps Marcom has gone rogue?
The new tagline sounds like tagline by committee. And that’s almost never going to result in something good.
As you say, far too often “branding” isn’t about messaging or donors. It’s about shiny things that don’t matter much: New name! New logo! New fonts! New colors! It all leaves me angry and with a very bad taste in my mouth.
Shaking my head.