A PR War Triggered by a Graphic Design Choice

As my colleague, Tim Kane has said, “People don’t buy brands. They join them.”

This was amply demonstrated this summer when Ikea unleashed a major global brouhaha by swapping its signature typeface — a customized version of Futura — for Verdana, a simpler, cheaper and more widely available font, originally created by Microsoft specifically to be used on the Web. (On his blog, Mattias Åkerberg compares and contrasts the two fonts.)

The reaction was swift and passionate. An article by Lisa Abend in TIME magazine quotes some typical responses: “‘Ikea, stop the Verdana madness!’ pleaded Tokyo's Oliver Reichenstein on Twitter. ‘Words can't describe my disgust,’ spat Ben Cristensen of Melbourne. ‘Horrific,’ lamented Christian Hughes in Dublin.”

In my opinion, the real problem is that Ikea is widely known for the unpretentious and simple — but beautiful — design of its furniture. Its original typeface fit the company’s style and, thus, supported the company’s brand. With the switch to Verdana, Ikea seems, to its some of its most hardcore fans, to be surrendering its originality and credibility for expediency … and violating its brand promise.

The Sorry State of the Nation’s Health Care

Did you know that 67 percent of Americans are overweight? That 40 percent get no exercise? Or that a whopping 96 percent of Americans don’t eat enough vegetables? Even more frightening is the fact that the current generation of American children may be the first ever to have a shorter life span than their parents.

Americans paid out a record 16 percent of our GDP (or $2 trillion) for health care in 2008 … making us the world’s biggest healthcare spender, on a per capita basis, according to a recent article by TIME reporter Alice Park. Notwithstanding the huge sums we throw at the problem of health care, the U.S. is ranked 19th — last! — among industrialized nations when it comes to preventable deaths.

The biggest problem with the U.S. health-care system, Park reports, is that it has been designed to respond to illness rather than prevent it: fully half of U.S. adults in 2005 did not receive recommended preventive care. “When we do get our cardiac health checked, too often it's because we've been rushed to the emergency room suffering from chest pains. When we do get a cancer evaluation, too often it's a diagnosis of advanced disease that has spread beyond the initial tumor site,” she writes.

If our ailing healthcare system is to recover, more attention needs to be paid to education, prevention and early treatment. It’s a strategy which has been shown to deliver promising results — for example, half of adults ages 50+ and older received a colon scan, meeting the colon cancer screening targets established by the Department of Health and Human Services in its Healthy People 2010 report.

President-elect Obama is said to rank health-care reform third on his list of top priorities, just behind addressing the financial crisis and passing an energy bill. From his mouth to our legislators’ ears.