kewpid.net

In the brouhaha of policy announce­ments and petty stoush­ing, the world might have missed Labor’s new insignia. Whatever might be said about its seedy under­belly, Labor cer­tainly has a slick machine, and the guy/s in charge of ALP brand­ing know exactly what they’re doing.

Com­pare and con­trast the old and new logos:

Boy A psp

• The Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show move

The stodgy ‘ALP’ has receded in favour of ‘Labor’ — a tacit wink-and-nod to the punters that Indus­trial Rela­tions is front and centre. Internal polling prob­ably showed that ‘ALP’ had neg­at­ive con­nota­tions, and ‘Labor’ was a more pos­it­ive brand to sell. The gar­ish amal­gam between the word­forms and the South­ern Cross has been split to cre­ate a pleas­ing motif posi­tioned under starry skies. The typeface too has been updated from rather life­less caps, to the won­der­fully kerned and eleg­ant Hel­vetica. The new col­ours though are a little odd. The new red and blue hues strongly con­vey a (pos­sibly rad­ic­ally) mod­ern feel, and detract from the “con­ser­vat­ive” image K-Rudd has been plump­ing ever since he got the leadership.

The new brand­ing exten­ded to the props used at the National Conference:

The “Fresh Think­ing” slo­gan lacks cadence, but it at least avoids the cringe of “Ease the squeeze”. Again the brand­ing choices here went against the “con­ser­vat­ive” grain. The choice of Lucida high­lights the “freshness” — it is mod­ern and crisp.

The mixed mes­sages the brand­ing sends is inher­ently tied up with con­tor­tions of Labor’s over­all mes­sage. It wants to por­tray Howard as past it, and out of touch; it basic­ally said as much. The corol­lary of this attack is that Labor is new and dynamic. At the same time how­ever, Labor knows it can’t afford to give up the middle ground.

So Labor’s mangled com­mu­niqué to the masses is that it’s fresh, but not too fresh, and con­ser­vat­ive, but not too con­ser­vat­ive. The strategy is all too pre­dict­able: be the same old catch-all poly­glot­tal party that it has been been for the past dec­ade that tries to appeal to every­body. For­tu­nately for Rudd, the cur­rent polling shows that it hasn’t yet fallen into the hole of appeal­ing to no-one.