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Wednesday, May 03, 2006

The EU Brand

For those of a paranoid nature, don’t fret, I am not talking about hot irons here, but rather about trade marks.

The EU brand is tarnished, connected as it is in the public’s mind to corruption, incompetence and overweening nannyism. The great unwashed even rejected the constitution.

So what would you do? Clean up the corruption? Cut down on new legislation? Get the accounts cleaned up?

Well not if you were of the calibre of our rulers you wouldn’t:

The European Commission has recruited Simon Anholt, a British brand consultant who has worked with Microsoft, Unilever and Coca Cola, to chair a panel of branding experts on European identity.
To try and make himself interesting, he likened the EU to al-Qaeda.

He did have something useful to say though:

He believes the EU has lost its central narrative: that it brought peace to a war torn continent.
Exactly, and that was 60 years ago, why not move on. Why do you think no-one has come up with another reason for its existence? We don’t need this beast, whatever name you give it, and if the product is rubbish, no amount of brand management will change that.

4 comments:

Ellee Seymour said...

Can you remind me in which EU countries it is compulsory to vote? I believe Greece is one, and there are two or three others too. What is the penalty if you don't vote?

AntiCitizenOne said...

NATO brought peace, the EU brought communsim lite.

Anonymous said...

Compulsory to vote...

Belgium.
I think there's theoretically a small fine if you don't without a good excuse (eg. out of the country), but in practice (7 years) I've never heard of anyone getting done so perhaps the officials don't bother chasing it up.

AntiCitizenOne said...

It would be great if the EU regulations were replaced with a brand mark.

We could see whether people REALLY wanted these rules and the additional costs that go with them.