The Norwegian Centre Party have redesigned their logo and moved away from a more stylistic image to a life-like picture. The logo is a four-leaf clover (as used by many political parties in the centre around Europe).

As with all profiled organisations this immediately turn into a public debate about whether the new logo is better than the old. And of course one turns to the professionals, in this case, the Design industry, to get their opinion on the matter. And they give a pretty technical explanation why this is a good or bad logo (mostly on the bad side).

But here’s the thing: You shouldn’t listen to them. They always have an alternative reason to comment; they are selling themselves and mainly talking to other professionals. And in this case its even worse since the logo is designed in-house and not in a professional agency. So the word amateurish is widely used.

What the party or newspapers should do is to test it on the target group. I admit that the experts also would be in this target group in this case, since the target group probably would be the whole grown up population, but they are still only a singel voice.

Many Newspapers do this through their polls, but only ask about whether you like the new or the old best (or none of them). And liking is a difficult factor to base a strategy on.

To the left the old logo wins (And the paper "Nationen" is closely linked to the Centre party) - To the right the new logo wins (and the paper "VG" is party independent and one of the biggest in Norway).

They should rather ask what associations people connect to the picture (the logo in this case) when they know that it is the logo of this particular political party and what they think the party is trying to communicate using this logo. If the answers to these questions are in line with the strategy and what the part stands for then it is a good logo, regardless of the technical quality.

This is not my choice of political party, but when I see the new logo I think about something close to nature and a realistic approach, maybe honest (it’s an actual picture). Not a bad strategy for a party like the Centre Party.

The funniest thing about it is that they said they wanted to use a four-leaf clover, but the picture is of a wood-sorrel. According to a Botanical expert the wood-sorrel taste good, but do not have the “lucky” association as the four-leaf clover has. This is a silly mistake coming from a party close to nature…

What are your associations?