This is something i've been thinking about for a while now, and only now has something come up that makes me think writing this article is actually needed.
For those of you who don't know, Weleda did a rebrand a while ago;
Q. G. Wingfield
and it looks weird, the way they went about it is weird, and their reasons for doing it make sense, but in practice, are weird.
In that article about the rebrand, i wrote;
The [new] logo will prove to be popular with previous consumers of Weleda in the sense that it is on the soap and skin cream that they buy. Will they like it any more than the other one? I would hazard a guess and say no, but i think maybe a survey or something along those lines would be needed to prove it.
While it's not a proper survey, people i spoke to at the Goetheanum (and not executives, not international buisinesspeople, but people on the ground who live there, and have for a few months or many years) agreed that this rebrand is not the way to go. One even said that he'd stopped buying Weleda products entirely.
"But surely the alternative to modernization is stagnation?"
My answer would be no, and here's why; the issue with the mindset that Weleda are using is the same that is sweeping Anthroposophical circles and the Goetheanum: the idea that everything that looks and feels Anthroposophical is old, dogmatic and weird and that everyone else also feels that way about it.
This is a problem for one obvious reason; just because those people have spent their lives around Anthropsophical things does not mean everyone else has, and most people actually think Anthroposophical design and capital A Anthroposophical stuff is cool.
When people are given weird, half-diluted things and told that they are "Steiner" they react badly, and from my own experience of running grassroots outreach with the Sheffield Steiner Group, running training sessions for staff at certain organisations, and running probably the largest anthroposophical community online, i know that people don't care about the marketing jargon; they want to get to the bottom of it and understand Anthroposophy.
They don't care how wonderful your biodynamic chair is, or what the Goetheanum looks like in different seasons, they want to know about Anthroposophy, and you haven't give them a way to do that. When you give people a weird diluted form of Anthropsophy, they can tell that something's off, they don't have the pieces needed to form a good conception of what is even going on, and often will leave without actually having internally met Anthroposophy, likely with lots of questions, some which probably will keep them from ever coming back again.
People today actually do care about Anthroposophy. However, you have to actually tell them about it and why they should care, which is the difficult part. And if you work at Weleda or the Goetheanum i would happily tell you how to do this. But the core of it simply is that Anthroposophy can solve many seemingly unrelated issues that exist in the world today, specifically ones that many people actually have (in terms of consumerism, attention span, etc), and if you can get them to see what the problem is, what a solution could be, and how they can in part apply it so that they can see it works for themselves.
Alongside that, many people are anthroposophists who don't know that they are anthroposophists. They think the same general things about spirituality and science, freedom, etc, but sometimes legitimately don't even have the words to put to those ideas because of their education or many other potential things.
That was a bit of a detour but i hope you get my point; hiding under a "modern" label likely won't do what Weleda thinks it will, if you remove Anthroposophical stuff to make it more modern you probably aren't making it more modern and you probably are either making it less Anthroposophical, worse, or both.
I can't remember when this was actually said so don't sue me but something along the lines of "Because of the rebrand, we did a big PR campaign and lots of promotional work, and sales went up, so the rebrand worked" came up around the rebrand and i think that this is a very interesting sentiment. Of course, i don't have access to any internal numbers or anything, but i would bet that sales went up because of the general modernisation of things like their website, and most importantly the promotional work; do you seriously think that the general public loved the rebrand so much they decided that they all decided in unison to buy Weleda stuff because they liked the logo? I would say that it's probably likely that the increase in sales comes from the promotion and PR campaign. Which is something that can be done whenever.
It is very possible to do things Anthroposophically, properly, and modern. Oftentimes if you really look, "Anthroposophy" and "Modern" are the same thing.
Through my work in Astronomica, and a future upcoming project which will be much bigger than Astronomica (OAM), i hope that this modern application of Anthroposophy is demonstrated.
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