I was involved on the internal marketing side of an organization that went through an expensive, externally-designed rebranding… I always wonder what the other, much better designs that got vetoed by some random member of upper management were, because in our case there were many.
The best part was when, very late in the process, someone highly-placed suddenly objected to the shape of a graphic element because of extremely vague potential negative associations—not going to reveal the actual element here, but it was on the order of “the diamond shape will make people think of baseball (even though we don’t do anything related to baseball) and the local team is terrible.” We sighed heavily and returned to the agency with that feedback. They responded by relabeling the diamond as a “kite,” without changing the shape at all. The objector was satisfied. It was possibly the single most genius act of marketing I’ve ever witnessed.
