KEY POINTS:
It is only extraordinary that the folks designing the new logo for the Auckland City Council did not notice the resemblance to that of a small regional television station. What is unbelievable is that the idea of "rebranding" the city was considered at all, much less put into action.
Depending on how you crunch the numbers, the new logo - a wavy triangle in three shades of blue - has cost the ratepayers somewhere between $25,000 and $1 million. The lower figure is, one assumes, the fee for designing the logo - although $16,000 was also set aside for law firm Buddle Findlay to register the design. The higher figure presumably includes all the expense of reproducing the logo on stationery and signage and the time of what a council source has described as "legions" of staff. But it would have been too expensive at any price.
It defies belief that the council's chief executive, David Rankin, and his executive team should have spent the past year developing the rebranding plan in virtual secrecy. Only a handful of senior councillors and the staff of the communications and marketing department were privy to it and it was presented as a fait accompli to the incoming council.
Why the secrecy? By what stretch of the imagination could the matter be considered commercially sensitive? It may have escaped the attention of the council staff, but they work for a monopoly. Ratepayers do not have the option of taking their business to another local authority - and even if they did, they would certainly not be doing so on the grounds that they thought their present provider of kerbs, channels and parking tickets had a tired old logo.
If the officers - and the senior councillors in the know - had announced that they were planning such a move, they - and the plan - would have drowned in a deluge of public opprobrium.
Surely, at some point during the year-long planning, somebody might have twigged that the city was going to get a new mayor and, very probably, a council of a different political hue. And did no member of this high-powered think-tank notice a groundswell of public outrage about soaring rates and water charges? The latter of those matters triggered the political demise of the deputy mayor. Did no one put two and two together and get "Uh oh"?
So now a new council, and a mayor publicly committed to stamping out unnecessary expenditure, are presented with a very expensive fait accompli in the form of expenditure which is about as unnecessary as can possibly be imagined. And, as if that were not enough, these spendthrift officers with a passion for modern design have come up with a logo that very possibly infringes someone else's intellectual property.
It's hard to imagine why a city council needs a marketing department that reportedly numbers more than three dozen. It is even harder to understand why it occurred to not one among them - all experts at assessing and massaging public perception of their employers - that this idea would go down like a lead balloon with hard-pressed ratepayers. Mr Rankin owes us all an explanation as to why several people - he most of all - should not resign over such a heinous blunder.
