Someone’s already launched a petition against the SUSU rebrand

It’s only been a few hours since the Soton Tab revealed the new SUSU (now ‘Us.’) logo and a Southampton student has already launched a petition to reverse it.

Student Mayan Al-Shakarchy shared the petition soon after the reveal, calling the rebrand “our Union’s attempt to save its low NSS score”, and lamenting the “lack of student engagement and opinion”.

While SUSU has certainly seen a decline in their NSS satisfaction feedback in recent years – from 77% in 2012 to just 69% in 2014, a blog post on the SUSU website details how a student survey was actually conducted earlier this year receiving feedback from 2,300 students on the rebrand.

Union President Ben Franklin commented in the same post that “creating unnecessary change, that is likely to be more inflammatory than satisfying, is not really what I’m all about.”

The petition also suggests “the logo should have been designed by a student; a simple competition to our Arts students over at Winchester Competition for a £500 prize would have engaged our students over at Winchester Campus that are often ignored and excluded from the wider university experience”.

The immediate backlash to the new design has been overwhelming, with many criticising the logo as ‘bland’ and ‘a joke’, while others pointed to the massive consultancy fee as a waste of tuition fees.

One commenter’s creative suggestion for the new logo

Ben Franklin responded to the backlash in a Facebook post this afternoon, saying “I would just like to encourage everyone to wait and see the whole thing before jumping on any bandwagon – this is a small part of an overall much bigger, better whole that will be revealed, in its entirety, over the next week.

“I’m still confident that over time this brand – when revealed in full, which is way more than just shown on this sign – has a lot more flexibility, creative potential and ties together everything the Union offers in a less childish, less outdated way.”