A service that de-logo-izes you car. Logos are on the hood, the trunk, the hubcaps, the door handles, the steering wheel, the glove box, the gear shift, the parking brake ... have I missed anything? Probably. Take your car in and get rid of all of them. Each part would be replaced by a "null" version of the same quality. It'd probably be too expensive to be feasible, but I can imagine that at a reasonable price it'd catch on.
I though about this while I was noticing the big-ass VW logo on the steering wheel of my Beetle. It's like, I swear, three or four inches across. I realized that a logo for something you love is still a logo and then wondered at how we succumb to all of this. It's in or nature, so fighting it is probably more unnatural than otherwise. But a logo-free car? That'd kinda be cool.
Maybe Naomi Klein has all the answers?
Posted by: Mason at May 4, 2005 01:53 PMA lot comes to mind when I think about the logo issue. I guess you could take the attitude that it doesn't really hurt anything (Klein certainly does not, but she has a much wider canvas).
How was branding in the past similar or different? Religious or nationalist symbols might have been used, in some instances, with an equal lack of care. That is: with an attitude similar to "oh, it came with that printed on it." Sortof tacit images that are forced upon you.
I've heard people say they hate logoed shirts--hating logoed cars takes that to an (probably unapproachable) extreme.
Again, it's natural for us to iconify objects (who said "Human beings are symbolic creatures"?), so I'm not so sure that the simple act of tagging objects with amoral corporate icons is really bad.