I don’t know quite how long this sign has been attached to the battered old front door of the college, but I think its about a year. This bit of A4 paper, stuck up with sun-faded crinkly sticky tape, provides an elegantly tragic metaphor for the College’s approach to it’s PR, and indeed everything else. Ok, so we don’t have to have a working front door to our University, and sure, there are probably numerous other things that are more broken and about to fall apart around the place, but come on - This is the one place that every single person who comes to visit the college, prospective students, visiting lecturers, proud parents etc, will experience as their first impression of the institution. They won’t experience the college’s shiny new (expensive) logo first, they will experiance its entrance. What I really love about it is that not only did they 1) not mend the door when it broke ages ago, and 2) use a crappy printed bit of paper to say that they weren’t going to fix it, but 3) when the next door broke, they just scribbled in a felt tip pen “s” to remind us all!!

That “s” is a metaphor for the college. When you are trying to re-think a brand, be it a burger bar or a higher educational institution, the number one priority is to think about what are the actual customer/consumer/user experiences of that brand. So when the primary ‘touchpoint’ of your brand’s head-quarters are broken, firstly, fix it ASAP, and secondly, if it breaks even more, don’t fix the lack of a fix with an even worse secondary fix in felt tip pen.

So the flet tip “s” is a metaphor. But the fact that the door hasn’t actually been fixed for a year is not a metaphor, it’s just ridiculous. I will remove this article if the college fixes the front door by the time I graduate in September.