“Any questions?” the newly appointed CMO asked, closing his 100-slide presentation.
He had clearly done this before—getting buy-in from the Chairman, MDs, board members, business heads, and half of senior management.
The deck felt like the first major act in his new role: outlining the need for a rebrand to move the organisation forward.
“The marketing landscape has changed. Customers see us as a legacy pharma company with no R&D and no real innovation—which isn’t true. The BCG study confirms this, and recommends we rebrand according to the 4Ps. You can refer to slides 56–85 for a summary of their findings. We need to reflect our ambitions and send a clear signal to existing and future customers. We need to differentiate ourselves from the competition. We need a brand architecture for our upcoming range of OTC medicines.”
We’ve heard this before.
Every client who approaches us with a branding brief says the same thing:
To stay relevant. To reflect change.
You’ve hired us to give you a visual overhaul to match your new ambitions. We get it.
At least this time, there was no free pitch. We were selected based on our “Initial Thoughts and Approaches” doc. No visuals—but still, a week of strategic thinking from our expensive ECD, writer, and strategists.
“Any more questions? Alright then. Look forward to hearing from you in three weeks.”
Two months later.
After a few rounds of presentations. After many options. After much fine-tuning. We’d finally arrived at something the CMO and his marketing team were happy with.
“Let’s just run it by the chairman for the final OK, and we can move into art-working the actual deliverables.”
A meeting was called. The Chairman came.
He was a wise, warm, 75-year-old uncle who listened patiently to our presentation.
“This looks like a lot of hard work, and I appreciate it. I’m just wondering—do we really need to change our current logo? Look at Shell. Their business has evolved a lot, but they’ve never changed the Shell.”
“The current tree logo was drawn by my old classmate, Subash—50 years ago. He later became the HR head at HDFC Bank. He’s retired now. A few years back, Ogilvy digitised it. But it’s still his tree.”
“Anyway, if you all feel it’s time to move on from the tree, can we try a butterfly? I’ve always liked the idea of a butterfly.”
What followed were multiple rounds of entirely new design explorations—based on the butterfly.
The hand-drawn butterfly. The graphic butterfly. The folk-art butterfly. The abstract-gradient-modern-tech butterfly.
The CMO, who once championed an abstract infinity loop, now tried to merge it into butterfly wings.
“Can we keep the infinity loop, but maybe make it the wings of the butterfly?”
We tried our best to steer him away from force-fitting the loop onto a butterfly.
We tried everything to kill the butterfly.
Politely. Strategically. Even desperately.
Too cliché. Too common. Too… tired.
“He’s the founder. He’s the chairman. If he wants a butterfly, we have to give him a butterfly,” said the CMO.
Weeks passed. We finally had a version that the CMO approved—a butterfly-infinity hybrid that ticked all his boxes.
We presented it to the chairman.
He looked at the slides. Quietly. Then:
“I don’t like the horizontal 8 in the butterfly. I know you’re trying to show infinity, but it just doesn’t work.”
“By the way—I told Nina about this rebranding and the butterfly idea. She sent me something she made. On something called Canva. Personally, I think it looks good. Maybe you can take her version and make it work?”
Nina, his Ivy League MBA daughter, had recently taken over the US marketing team.
“She’s very talented,” the chairman added.
“What do we do now?”
The CMO shrugged.
“Let’s just take her version and see if we can make it work…”
This is a re-telling of a real client story, shared with me over coffee.
The project dragged on for six months.
Nina got more involved—choosing colours, fonts, reviewing everything and approving nothing.
Eventually, the entire rebrand was shelved.
The CMO lost interest and shifted his attention back to communications and advertising campaigns—using the old tree logo.
In the end, the tree stayed.
Not because it was right, but because it was familiar.
The butterfly and infinity loop never saw the light of day.
The rebrand rebranded itself into silence.
I’ve heard countless versions of this story. I’ve lived through a few myself.
There are two truths I’ve learned:
- Most branding briefs are vague—even the ones written by McKinsey or BCG.
They all say the same thing: stay relevant, reflect change, be future-ready.
It’s always up to the designers to translate vague ambition into distinct, memorable form. - But logos are never just logos.
When branding gets personal, logic becomes irrelevant. A butterfly gets chosen not for meaning, but because someone likes butterflies. Purple, because someone thinks it feels premium. Poppins, because someone says it’s clean. Because the CMO wants it. Because the chairman wants it. Because Nina made in on Canva.
For my sanity, I’ve chosen to stay away from branding projects.
Last word.
- Infinity loop—How cliché!
- “Initial Thoughts and Approaches” document—Don’t be surprised if some parts were incorporated by the other agency who got the job. Don’t blame them though—they were briefed by the CMO to do so; they never saw the document.