IT now seems most Bathurst councillors are fed up with the debacle that has been the release of a new branding strategy for the city, but there’s no consensus yet on what the next move should be.
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And the fact that two separate notices of motion will go before Wednesday night’s monthly meeting is only further proof of the chaos the new logo and Forever Young tagline have created.
Councillors Monica Morse and Ian North have lodged a notice of motion calling for the rollout of the branding strategy to be deferred “pending a report on options for the future direction of the branding”.
At the same time, councillors Bobby Bourke and Jess Jennings are calling on council to go back to the consultants that developed the strategy “to provide two additional redesigned logos and two additional redesigned tag lines” for consideration by council.
What’s missing from both notices of motion, though, is a call to immediately dump the new logo and start again.
No doubt the councillors are reluctant to write off the $40,000 that has been spent so far but we must have reached a point by now where nothing could save the logo – particularly the Forever Young tagline.
To make any real progress now, council should make dumping Forever Young the starting point rather than talking about deferring the rollout and even before considering other options.
Then we need to decide what is unique about Bathurst and make that the centre of the new campaign.
And it should not be that hard as council already has the results of a community survey that asked that very question.
Those results have not been made public but it’s a reasonable bet that Mount Panorama and Australia’s oldest inland European settlement would have featured strongly in most responses.
What would not have featured strongly would be any combination of responses that could justify the choice of Forever Young – a cliched, inappropriate and (as it turns out) unoriginal tagline.
Before anything happens, though, a majority of councillors must agree on the best path to take and that consensus still seems some way off.
Whatever councillors decide, though, the best result for Bathurst would be for them to present a united front rather than letting this debacle create a split in the chamber.
Let’s see if that’s too much to ask.