This post is about one of my 45-second pitches at my BNI Chapter, BNI City Business. You can read the introduction to this collection here.

21 July, 2023. After a week off BNI for Matariki, I was up for my 5-minute presentation (see here), and with it, I launched a new series. This series – which I refer to as Another Lens – is a collection of (unintentionally) bad logos. Perfectly sensible to their creators, I’m sure, but when looked at by someone seeing it for the first time from another perspective, revealing a message quite different from what the organisations involved were thinking.

In my previous 5-minute presentation, I shared The Tapping Game with my BNI Chapter. This is a great tool to get across the notion that not everyone is on the same page. Your context is different from that of your audience, your customers, and the wider public. If you are in the Maple Syrup business (in, say, Vermont), the shape of your state, the use of a tap into a maple tree to collect the syrup, and the collection vat, are all familiar. There may have been previous versions of this logo that developed over time. These are all context. Without this lens of context – seeing the image through another lens – can give rise to a very different interpretation.

As best as I can tell, this is – or at least was – a real logo (after all, you can’t trust things you find on the internet!). The Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association has another (newer?) logo: