The whole concept of "branding" is a vacuous hustle, the majority of the time. You can spend outrageous amounts of money "improving" your "brand" with only vague ideas and doublespeak. Nowhere is this more evident than in "rebranding" and logo redesign and shit like that, that could be accomplished by one guy with a pencil in 45 minutes, but instead is farmed out to consultants for ridiculous sums. Mindshare, a big media agency, just paid half a million bucks for this:

The network's branding retains the signature colour purple, which was established at its inception, but includes a complete refresh of the agency's brandmark and visual identity. The new brandmark consists of a bespoke wordmark and Mindshare's new partner symbol. The symbol has been created to reflect the structure and form of Mindshare's business. It shows two forms coming together to create a new, strong form reflecting Mindshare's partnerships with clients, suppliers and other agencies. The flow of colour symbolises the flow of creativity across the business and the segmentation mirrors the bringing together of specialist expertise within Mindshare's "open source" approach to client business which enhances a platform neutral approach. The bespoke wordmark shows Mindshare in upper case [as shown above]. When written in prose Mindshare no longer has the upper case "S" previously used – hence the company's name will now be written Mindshare and not MindShare. In visual form on the printed page, this will represent the agency's new simplified approach, re-engineering its structure from more than a dozen separate specialist departments to four integrated, collaborative groups: Client Leadership, Business Planning, Invention and The Exchange. The bold new brandmark expresses Mindshare's progressive attitude to new technology and the connected way in which the network views the media landscape.

Idiots. [via AgencySpy]