Action on branding loss

The jury inside my head was out. So I gave it a few weeks. I wanted my left brain to provide a counter thought to what my right brain was saying. I’ve waited in vain. My mind still does not like the RNID name change, launched for the charity’s 100th anniversary.

I had thought that Action On Hearing Loss was a good strapline. I’m no fan of acronyms, but if you’ve got one that has some equity, why throw it away in favour of...well, something that sounds like a start-up charity in the backwaters of Birmingham?

It’s as if the charity said to itself: “We look too swanky and sophisticated. We need to get back to our roots and look and sound like a hard-edge, warts-and-all campaigning charity for people who are hard of hearing.”

The charity can point to research that told it that the RNID initials were often confused by the public with RNIB, or even RNLI. So, was the best course of action to leave the ‘RN’ field to these other charities, or to work harder at creating a context so that the public would not be confused?

I don’t doubt that what the charity calls its new ‘underline-strikethrough’ logo addresses the need to point to the negative effects of hearing loss. But if the whole idea was to emphasise that the charity is not just about deafness, but varying degrees of hearing loss, does the new name really serve the purpose? Am I splitting hairs when I say that ‘hearing loss’ sends the same meaning as ‘deafness’?

It seems that there’s a lot of politics behind a name change that leaves some deaf people wondering whether they’ve been left behind, now that the focus is on the varying stages of hearing loss that precede deafness. As anyone who has worked with charities or organisations in this part of the disability sector will know, deaf people are anything but quiet when it comes to airing their views. Is it harder to raise money for people who are already deaf? Harder than it is to raise money and awareness with people who are in danger of losing their hearing? Which, in the end, is so many of us.

The thing is, I don’t like the new name now, but I may come to like it soon. The reason for this is that I never said I didn’t like the rebrand – the change of focus and attempt to become more relevant to people who, literally, need to hear the message. And that new message is probably a lot clearer than the old message.

Action On Hearing Loss wants people to acknowledge their hearing loss and take action. It wants to create more support for people with hearing loss. It believes that no-one should be isolated through varying degrees of hearing loss. It wants people to protect themselves against hearing loss and tinnitus. Ultimately, it wants to cure hearing loss and tinnitus.

I can’t argue with any of this. In the end, an organisation’s name acquires the meaning that all the brand activity gives to it. So, I’ll be left admiring all this, but still disliking the logo.

Mark Griffiths www.idealconsulting.co.uk