This post is about one of my 45-second pitches at my BNI Chapter, BNI City Business. You can read the introduction to this collection here.

8 September 2023. Continuing my bad logo series at BNI City Business. Logos and branding can be key business value drivers for small businesses.

Actually, this isn’t a bad logo. This pitch is touching on a different aspect of branding: controlling how your brand is used. Intentionally or not, someone, somewhere is going to misuse and abuse your brand, imagery, slogan, or business collateral. You can’t control that. You can try to think about how your imagery might be defaced, or juxtaposed, or innocently given a new context, but you won’t think of them all. And it will be the one you don’t think of that will cause the most offence or embarrassment.

We are in our election cycle here in New Zealand. We are seeing pretty much everyone’s hoardings get vandalised or defaced. Some are amusing, most aim for offensive. I am sure our political parties think through how their messages and brands can be bastardised to avoid them, but every cycle, we see new ways of bending the message from what was intended.

My father worked at the Avis franchisee in Auckland in the 1980s. Avis is a global brand, but its use was in transition here in New Zealand at the time (as the company went from Mutual Rent-a-Car to Mutual Avis, and then Avis). The firm would freely hand out Avis branded t-shirts. In the mid-1980s, as New Zealanders debated the Homosexual Law Reform Bill moving through parliament, there was a large gay-rights protest march in Auckland’s CBD. One of the protesters in the front row was wearing one of Avis’s t-shirts. Images of the protest were on the TV news and front page of The New Zealand Herald. The person wearing the t-shirt was not even an Avis employee, but the presence of the logo caused concern amongst the Avis management. The t-shirts were harder to obtain after that.

Once your brand is out there, you can’t control how it is used and abused. Try as you might.