So the people have spoken. The lotus flower has been overwhelmingly backed as Vietnam’s national icon. What do you mean you thought it already was? I assume you got that impression from the fact that the national flag carrier Vietnam Airlines already features the flower prominently on the sides of its fleet? Or perhaps it was the fact that you’re daily bombarded on Facebook by teen girls wearing white ao dai doing ‘sen’ photoshoots with quite appropriately the Hoa Sen lotus? Or maybe it was the copious amounts of lotus derived products that are annually churned out in Vietnam?
Anyway I think I’ve made my point. Sometimes public consultation is rather pointless when the answer is blazingly obvious. If anything asking the public for their views is a recipe for disaster. I can’t help but think a perfect example was the competition organised a few years ago by the Vietnam Football Federation where they asked the nation to contribute their idea for a new VFF badge. Now the current design isn’t terrible, but come on guys, you’re a professional body now, marketing and branding are key aspects of developing an identity for Vietnamese football. This is the time when you employ a professional marketing company to do research into the topic, consult with branding experts and then agree a design. Cheerful amateurism is no longer good enough.
The same can be said for the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism’s slogan ‘Vietnam a different Orient’, which when announced had a whole newsroom at Vietnam News falling about laughing at its crass ineptitude.
So what was that slogan trying to say to the international tourism industry and potential holiday makers in Vietnam? Vietnam, it’s kind of like the rest of the East but ummm….kind of different? The thing that struck me was Vietnam a different Orient…what, like Leyton Orient Football Club? Or ‘like China but down a bit, down a bit, and left, yeah, that’s it next door to Laos’. In addition, the use of the word ‘Orient’ probably falls under the list of words no longer acceptable for polite company, smacking of Western imperialist interpretations of Eastern cultures, and a word specifically denounced in academia by renowned Palestinian Edward Said, who said ‘since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.’
If the prize winning entry wasn’t bad enough, the runners-up were hailed for their amazingly imaginative “Đất nước của những nụ cười” (the country of smiles)…wait hold on, you mean almost exactly the same slogan that Thailand has been using for the last 30 years? So after a four month contest with 413 entries from 233 designers, we ended up with a terrible winner and a copy-cat second place entry!
Enough! The time for cheerful amateurism is over, and Vietnamese businesses and state agencies are going to have to bite the bullet. Marketing and branding is not a bit of fun or an opportunity for amateur graphic designers to test their photoshop skills, especially when it involves millions of dollars of the country’s money, and potential ridicule.
Anyway I think I’ve made my point. Sometimes public consultation is rather pointless when the answer is blazingly obvious. If anything asking the public for their views is a recipe for disaster. I can’t help but think a perfect example was the competition organised a few years ago by the Vietnam Football Federation where they asked the nation to contribute their idea for a new VFF badge. Now the current design isn’t terrible, but come on guys, you’re a professional body now, marketing and branding are key aspects of developing an identity for Vietnamese football. This is the time when you employ a professional marketing company to do research into the topic, consult with branding experts and then agree a design. Cheerful amateurism is no longer good enough.The same can be said for the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism’s slogan ‘Vietnam a different Orient’, which when announced had a whole newsroom at Vietnam News falling about laughing at its crass ineptitude.
So what was that slogan trying to say to the international tourism industry and potential holiday makers in Vietnam? Vietnam, it’s kind of like the rest of the East but ummm….kind of different? The thing that struck me was Vietnam a different Orient…what, like Leyton Orient Football Club? Or ‘like China but down a bit, down a bit, and left, yeah, that’s it next door to Laos’. In addition, the use of the word ‘Orient’ probably falls under the list of words no longer acceptable for polite company, smacking of Western imperialist interpretations of Eastern cultures, and a word specifically denounced in academia by renowned Palestinian Edward Said, who said ‘since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.’
If the prize winning entry wasn’t bad enough, the runners-up were hailed for their amazingly imaginative “Đất nước của những nụ cười” (the country of smiles)…wait hold on, you mean almost exactly the same slogan that Thailand has been using for the last 30 years? So after a four month contest with 413 entries from 233 designers, we ended up with a terrible winner and a copy-cat second place entry!
Enough! The time for cheerful amateurism is over, and Vietnamese businesses and state agencies are going to have to bite the bullet. Marketing and branding is not a bit of fun or an opportunity for amateur graphic designers to test their photoshop skills, especially when it involves millions of dollars of the country’s money, and potential ridicule.
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