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Liddle Britain

You get the Olympic logo you deserve

Rod Liddle

Wednesday, 6th June 2007

But delve a little deeper and you will find that our design, our little logo, gives you a pretty good flavour of Britain and its delusions and confusions. Not that harmless little image itself, but the fatuous rubbish which lies behind it. Read again, for example, that meaningless, self-aggrandising, unintentionally hilarious guff from Wolff-Olins which precedes this article. Who would think, reading that, that the company’s primary employment was in scribbling the kind of thing you knock off idly on a sodden beermat while trying to remember what work you have to do? Or, better still, check out their website, enter the Wolff-Olins house of cards, where there’s much, much more of this pretentious, chest-beating drivel. They offer companies ‘potential platforms for action’. And then — God only knows what this means — ‘We think brands need to be less controlling, more generous.’ How precisely will they do this? ‘We help you invent new ways that move the world forward.’ Oh, good, many thanks for that, gentlemen. And then a rare moment of truth, or the truth as they have it: ‘Brand isn’t marketing. It’s everything.’

Brand is everything; that old advertising shibboleth that you can’t sell a thing if the product is rubbish is here turned on its head. As far as Wolff-Olins is concerned, you don’t even need a product in the first place, just a brand — a fiction, an idea, a notion to flog in the marketplace.

We should have become used to this vapid, ugly, empty verbiage by now — it is the currency of corporate management-speak, of the local governments and the quangos and NGOs — and increasingly it pervades our national political discourse, too. Sentence after sentence which seem to promise so much (‘We help you invent new ways that move the world forward’!) but deliver absolutely nothing. A mode of communication which somehow manages to be simultaneously disingenuous and sincere.

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