The Citigroup building has finally got its new name up. One day shortly before Christmas, I looked up to spy a man in an orange jump suit sitting in the middle of the big C - exactly like the guy in the Chanel advert. I'm sure that's what he was thinking to himself too, as there was no obvious reason for him to be there and he didn't appear to be doing anything except sit. At that point the C was all there was to see, but now the complete, not particularly majestic logo is back on all four sides of the building (see pic).
To understand this exercise in pointlessness we have to go back to February 14th, 2007. Oh, happy days, when the sub-prime crisis was just a cloud on the horizon, as Citigroup confirmed that it would tie its businesses together under the Citi brand, with a simple stylized arc over its name, at the same time selling back its familiar red umbrella to the St. Paul Travelers, the insurance company that had previously used the logo.
"Citi is already among the most recognized and respected brands in global financial services," Charles Prince 3rd, Citigroup's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. "It is how most of our clients think about us already."
We won't go into all that again - everyone knows what happened next, and Mr Prince himself is long gone. And now, two years later, and no doubt at no small cost, the new umbrella-less logo is finally in place on the Citigroup building, proving that some kinds of corporate silliness are very resilient indeed. Credit Suisse did the same thing three years ago, and are in almost as bad a mess as Citi, but their shareholders can take comfort in the thought that as their building is only 19 storeys high they probably had to pay less to the men who installed the logo.
And lastly for anyone who was wondering, we did finally manage to get the seal video off Harry's phone, but it got a bit truncated in the process. Here's what survived. It is a seal, honestly !!!
