I was staggered to read in Personnel Today last week (9 October) that the Commission for Equality and Human Rights – or the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), as we must now refer to it – spent £100,000 re-branding itself. I object to this colossal waste of money for so many reasons I don’t know where to start.
Above all, this is an enormous sum to spend on something so superficial. As an HR professional specialising in diversity, I am all too aware that there is a huge amount to do in this area, and that money could have been spent far more effectively to raise awareness of the issues the EHRC is supposed to be representing.
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And this ridiculous branding exercise hasn’t raised its profile one jot – at least online. Type the new acronym into Google, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission barely makes the first page. In top place is www.ehrc.org.uk, the website of the Environmental Health Resource Centre – a totally unrelated consultancy which obviously secured this snappy web address first. In second and third place is the European Humanities Research Centre – an obscure corner of Oxford University. Only if you can be bothered to type out the name in full does the Equality and Human Rights Commission make the top spot, with the clunky www.equalityhumanrights.com as its new address.
As for the logo itself, I thought it was a misprint. Only when I read the story did I realise it is an ‘equals’ sign. It makes the new Olympics logo look like a work of design genius. I can only hope we won’t read in a future issue of Personnel Today that the EHRC has spent another obscene amount to redesign its logo – like BT did after its disastrous ‘man with horn’ image made the company a laughing stock.
