Branding and brand images can be powerful entities. Two logos that I see almost every day remind me of two significant characters from history who we remember for their respective villainy and heroism.
One was a man who had a vision to forge a new future for people within his sphere of responsibility. His Robin-Hood-style plan was to make car-ownership available to average families; something that would open up doors for them, creating possibilities and freedoms within a globalising world. Up until his era, such freedoms had been a luxury affordable only to society’s wealthy; the most an average citizen could afford was a motorcycle. Under the new state-sponsored program a family could make weekly payments into a savings scheme and drive away with a vehicle that could carry up to two adults, three children and luggage, at 62mph.
The other man had a vision to forge a new future for people from distant lands and of alien language and culture. He himself travelled extensively and endured harsh living conditions in order to help people who had been subject to slavery, mostly ruthlessly, and frequently fatally. His plan was to equip them with a means out of their predicament, by trading commodities as an alternative to labour and through faith-based societal teaching. His earlier trips were made together with his family, but as his divine mission increasingly obsessed him, he left behind those for whom he had responsibility where his wife became an isolated and depressed alcoholic.
It is difficult to find Good Intention exercised in one realm that has not had an adverse affect, to some extent, in another.
The latter character was, obviously, David Livingstone, whose surname is printed in bold letters across our kids’ school uniform. The first, Adolf Hitler and Volkswagen whose logo perpetually glares at me from the centre of my steering wheel.
The hero, the villain, and the side that we forget.
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