Amazon Decides App Needs New Logo

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This is where cancel culture meets Adolf Hitler's pareidolia. The sly doppelganger is neither the first nor the last.

Adolf Hitler committed suicide in 1945. As the leader of the Nazi Party in Germany, he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. He had a small, rectangular moustache.

Seventy-five years later, e-commerce giant Amazon was forced to change its new uruguay whatsapp list mobile app logo, which featured the trademark smile and jagged blue ribbon on a beige rectangle. It's the signature Amazon box with blue packing tape. According to people online, the smile makes it look like a German dictator. The blue stripe was transformed into a sticker with a dog-eared corner a month later, and the company wisely dispensed with a press release about the rebranding.

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The scientific name for this phenomenon is pareidolia. It describes the phenomenon when, in an ambiguous visual image, many people see a specific, often socially significant image. This is why some of us can see Jesus on toast and a man on the moon. This phenomenon explains photographs of clouds of some incredible shape: usually resembling faces, and sometimes objects from the reality around us. For example, when the series Game of Thrones was at the height of its fame, the Internet was flooded with photos of clouds shaped like dragons.

But in 2021, a person or corporation has never decided to apologize and change something because a group of people suddenly decided to take collective offense. The situation looks like temporary madness, but nevertheless aimed at a specific goal. But that's why Amazon is Amazon, because it decided not to let it get to the point of a scandal. This company has always focused on the desires and needs of its customers, so it simply changed its logo.

You could say this story is the apotheosis of the “cancel culture” that never got going. People were ready to take offense and slander Amazon, but the company got ahead of them – changed the shape of one element – ​​and thus smoothed over any controversy without getting into an argument.

A short digression
“Cancel Culture” is the main expression of 2019, according to Macquarie Dictionary. It refers to a form of public condemnation of a person or company, when in response to “wrong” actions on their part, society declares a boycott and pushes them out of professional or social circles, as if “canceling” them. More familiar analogues of this expression in the Russian language are bullying and ostracism.

Other problematic logos
This is, of course, far from the first time the logo has been changed due to a possible violation, no matter how ridiculous it may look.

Then there are logos that have proven controversial due to their questionable artistic value. The best example is probably the terrible logo for the 2012 London Olympics. The logo for the 2020 Tokyo Games had to be changed after a plagiarism scandal.

Another striking example is the story of British Petroleum (BP). People were annoyed that the green flower, which the company made its new logo in 2000, contradicted its oil production activities. You can read about this case, as well as other examples of controversial logos, in this article (in English).

Many people have disliked the new logo of Welsh fried chicken brand Dirty Chicken, which uses the letters "d" and "b". It depicts a chicken's head, but the logo clearly references human anatomy. Cover your eyes, baby!

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But Amazon's Hitler icon — which, it must be said, doesn't look like Hitler — stands out from all of these stories because, in six months, no one will remember why it had to be changed. It's also worth noting that it's just not a very good logo.