We Are The (Brand) Champions

Though I had to be up early today, I stayed up until about 1 am last nigh working on the picture in the previous post.
Naturally, because that’s just the way things work, I didn’t manage to fall asleep for well over an hour, resulting in me having to operate on about 5 hours’ worth of sleep today.
The reason I had to get up early was to attend a training session for work.  The time was set as 8:30, though that was just an attempt to make sure that everyone showed up by 9.
Even though it was only a drive of 10 miles or so, it took me almost 45 minutes to get there, though I was still (just barely) on time, even for the made up, half an hour early start time.
Because the rules about that sort of thing are nebulous at best, I never come out and explicitly say where I work (though many of you know, and others of you could probably guess).
I figure that it gives me a little bit of leeway to talk – in general terms, at least – about some of the goings-on at my workplace if I never come out and explicitly state that I work for “Company XYZ.”
In any case, my company has been trying to sort of reinvent and reposition itself in the market place.
As part of that initiative we’ve changed our logo and, recently, changed our name.
In order to make sure that employees our all on the same page about what kind of image, or “brand,” we’re trying to create in the minds of consumers, the company offers a series of training seminars that explain what kind of image we’re trying to project, what some of the reasons behind choosing that image are, how we went about deciding on this particular image, and how we intend to go about projecting it.  The idea is that if, as stakeholders in the company, we’re all well-informed about this sort of thing we are better equipped to serve as advocates, or as they called it, champions, for our brand.
Yes, it is exactly as gay and retarded as it sounds, but from our perspective, Scott, Brian, and I all saw it as a relatively easy way to earn some overtime.
Also, free food.
Beyond that, we got a few little souvenirs that showcase our brand (notepads, pens, T-shirts, and even a little 32 MB flash drive, which was kind of cool, despite the anemic storage capacity).
The downside was that we had to engage in various group activities, but they weren’t too irritating, I guess.
Beyond the activities, various people involved in our brand initiatives got up and made presentations about the whys and wherefores of the whole thing.
In addition to changing our logo, we also made a change to what can best be described as our company mascot a while back.
This woman named Katrina got up and talked about mascots in general, the history of our mascot, why the change was made, how the change was made, and what options are available to us in making use of the mascot on the Web or in print.
The main thing I took away from this presentation?  I want to bang Katrina.
(While she was speaking, I used one of the notepads to inform Scott of this, writing, “FYI, I’d bang Katrina.”)
That probably tells you all you need to know about what I took away from the day.
Honestly, some of it was actually kind of interesting, and much of it was rather familiar, especially the stuff about proper logo usage and style guides, as I used to be involved in that sort of thing back in my days of working in PR (Public Relations, not Puerto Rico), as (among many other things) I was the person who had to ensure that the logo was always used consistently and that various style guidelines were adhered to in all internal and external communications.
So overall, despite having to get up early, it was an easy way to earn 8 hours’ worth of OT, and it will serve as a nice addition to all of the OT I’ll be getting next week from my Red Hat training.