There’s a big brouhaha in the news about United Airlines and their moment of infamy when a video surfaced showing them dragging a paying, protesting passenger from one of their planes.
There is one story of overbooking and repeated appeals for passengers to leave voluntarily. There are hints of “more to the story” as investigations continue. There are memes all over the media and official airline spokespeople dancing as fast as they can. But the company should conserve their energy. The damage is done.
It’s not about the confrontation, not about the policy, not about the right or wrong of it all. It’s about the appearance of brutality and the textbook example of customer relations gone horribly wrong. It’s all bad. No matter how the facts of the encounter ultimately shake out, the damage to the company’s public reputation is complete and can’t be undone.
Businesses often make really stupid moves with a selective blindness that amounts to obliviousness.
This has happened many, many times in the unthinking design of corporate logos. Just Google a few phrases about unfortunate logo design and you’ll see what I mean. I was actually present when this happened once. The new symbol was rolled out with seemingly no notice, conferencing, or focus groups involved. Management dropped a surprise on us all, a surprise that looked for all the world like a sex toy.
The astonishingly inappropriate image wasn’t just announced or displayed, but unveiled in large scale in the public architecture at no small cost. Later, I overheard a group conversation about the installation. Some people expressed genuine surprise at the dirty-minded interpretation of others, saying they never made that association. I believe them, even though I’m a bit more jaded and find it hard to believe I could look at that image and NOT see it.
And therein is the problem. Even if a lot of your loyal customers would never think your new logo as sexually suggestive or otherwise offensive, eventually they will learn that others do. And it’s like the old double dildo: once the questionable nature of the design is pointed out, everyone will see it forever after.
You can’t un-see what repels you. You can only hope that no one comes along and says, “Look!”