{"id":1280,"date":"2021-05-24T15:03:57","date_gmt":"2021-05-24T04:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/?p=1280"},"modified":"2021-05-24T15:36:40","modified_gmt":"2021-05-24T04:36:40","slug":"the-boring-logo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/the-boring-logo\/","title":{"rendered":"The boring logo"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
\"Soteria<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Let me seduce you into trusting me by being so bland, so innocuous that I will easily lull you into a state of blessed relief.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

One might think that the function of a logo and associated corporate branding is to stand out from the crowd, to do a little dance and shimmy in order to catch the eye and make a lasting impression. A good logo is worth its weight in golden arches, able to connect instantly with its target prey\u2026 err, audience, and engender all those positive feelings of association, desire and, ultimately, consumption.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

But not in this case. It would be a challenge to come up with a logo any more insipid or meaningless \u2013 and if you did, it would probably, perversely, be quite a bit more interesting. This has just the right degree of instant forgettability, the design equivalent of a backbencher\u2019s speech (or a blog), existing for its own sake but barely noticed by anybody. But why?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

God knows there are enough boring logos out there without anybody deliberately trying to add to the pile, but this one is so anonymous as to suggest it is part of a calculated strategy. And what of the brand name? I defy anybody to tell me, from the name alone, what this company is selling. It really is a mark of genius to come up with a name that evokes almost no connotations at all, neither good nor bad, positive or negative. It exists in its own perfectly poised bubble of meaninglessness.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I could say something about the colours too \u2013 a dominant blue and a highlight colour which is another\u2026 I dunno, maybe another kind of blue? We all know about blue though. Calming, safe, secure, reliable \u2013 so perhaps this gives you a clue as to where this is all going.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Let\u2019s open it up anyway (it\u2019s an A4 roll fold to DL size) and see the reveal.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Soteria<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

You see, that in itself is a kind of brilliance. Expert advice, solutions, experience\u2026 and still I have no idea what they are selling<\/em>. It\u2019s almost as if they don\u2019t want me to know what they do. I might even have to call them up<\/em> to find out. It\u2019s got to be an arms dealer eh? Or a company that wants to take away my nuclear waste.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Soteria<\/a>Opening up the whole piece gives the game away immediately with a cartoon image of a man kicking a wrecking ball of DEBT while his family safely make their way home to a little suburban house. It\u2019s about money \u2013 or rather that largely taboo topic of personal financing: debt. Crushing debt. Debt that is about smash our lives and destroy everything we\u2019ve worked so hard to accumulate. Debt that threatens to annihilate who we are. An existential level of debt that consumes everything in its path.<\/p>\r\n

Now it all makes sense; the low-key approach, the deliberate avoidance of any razzle-dazzle or blowing of trumpets. The key word here is stress; this is already a highly-charged situation (if you\u2019re the person to whom this leaflet is speaking) so the goal is not to inject more emotion into the proposition, to hype it up, but rather to drain it all away. Make it seem totally normal, boring, manageable. Unremarkable.<\/p>\r\n

The rest of the flyer is just text in the form of a letter which, again, is quite noteworthy for what it does. Nobody reads this much, do they? Not in an advertising flyer anyway. Even with the inclusion of four bullet points to break it up a bit, that\u2019s a lot of words to consume.<\/p>\r\n

\"Soteria<\/a><\/p>\r\n

The whole thing is crafted to be quietly soothing, professional and authoritative. Peace of mind is mentioned a couple of times. It speaks of helping people \u2018who find themselves in mortgage stress\u2019 as if, lo and behold, they suddenly woke up one morning and found themselves surrounded by a thicket of missed payments. Shit, where did all this fucking debt come from?<\/p>\r\n

One sentence in particular is worth quoting, just for the way it breaks all the rules of snappy, incisive copy writing:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

We understand how stressful it can be to be under financial pressure so we\u2019ve developed a completely different business model that puts you at the heart of the process to develop a solution tailored to your unique situation that really works to remove the stress.<\/em><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Wow. I don\u2019t know what it means exactly but at the end of it I\u2019m too exhausted to offer any resistance. Whatever it is they\u2019re handing out, I want some of it.<\/p>\r\n

I understand, too, how such word assemblages work, if only because I\u2019m equally guilty of writing swathes of similarly meaningless buzzword-heavy text blobs which sound as if they\u2019re groping towards an insight of staggering significance without, ultimately, really saying anything at all.<\/p>\r\n

Just a side note \u2013 it\u2019s interesting how often hyperlinks are preserved in printed document these days, underlined and in a different font colour, as happens with the company website address here. It\u2019s probably because the document was originally created as a pdf which kept the link and its styling. We\u2019re so blinded to it now nobody notices to take it out even when the functionality no longer exists.<\/p>\r\n

Overall, I now have a vague idea about what Soteria does although the main take-away I get from this leaflet is that they are expertly skilled in tackling something that people really don\u2019t want to have to deal with and then simply boring it into submission.<\/p>\r\n

Yeah, I can relate to that.<\/p>\r\n

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Let me seduce you into trusting me by being so bland, so innocuous that I will easily lull you into a state of blessed relief. One might think that the function of a logo and associated corporate branding is to stand out from the crowd, to do a little dance and shimmy in order to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dl-size"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1290,"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions\/1290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadreal.com.au\/dead_paper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}