The emancipation of Standard Bank (by Issa Sikiti da Silva) and Slogan change uninspired (by Chris Moerdyk) are two articles over at Biz-Community that cover Standard Bank's recent rebranding exercise. You can read more at MarketingWeb: Standard Bank gets inspired, motivated and involved (by Gillian Jones).

Some Chris Moerdyk extracts:

The decision by Standard Bank to change its corporate slogan is marketing lunacy. 'Simpler. Better. Faster.' is to be replaced with 'Inspired. Motivated. Involved.'... so incredibly contrived and corny, one cannot help wondering if this is some sort of April Fool's joke.

Standard Bank's move follows Toyota SA's decision almost two years ago to dump its 'Everything Keeps Going Right' slogan for something almost as equally contrived as Standard Bank's latest effort. And how many people after all this time can actually remember what Toyota's new slogan is? ...I rest my case.

True marketing is a discipline that that has more chance of being understood by an ordered accountant than an advertising creative.

Sarah-Anne Orphanides - Standard Bank group marketing director - has this to say:

'Simpler. Better. Faster.' served us extremely well for many years and is a strong slogan, but it must be remembered that in an environment where customers' need are continuously changing, Standard Bank as an organisation needs to consistently evolve. Our new pay-off line - 'Inspired. Motivated. Involved.' - encapsulates the essence of what we are and what we would like to be for our customers, our people and our stakeholders. We are striving to make a real difference.

If I wanted inspiration and motivation, my bank is the last place I'd turn to. You gotta love the public feedback, and I can only agree when for a bank who charge me over R100 a month simply to withdraw and manage my accounts online, this was a complete waste of money.

The Mozilla Foundation announced yesterday the immediate availability of a new preview release of its next generation web browser: Mozilla Firefox - previously Firebird, previously Phoenix. You can also read more on the rebranding process (which I think is looking excellent) by the artists involved: Steve Garrity, Jon Hicks and Daniel Burka.

Mozilla Firefox 0.8 represents the bleeding edge of Internet technology and raises the bar for ease of use, performance, robustness and standards compliance. Less than 3 minutes to download over a broadband connection, Firefox can be yours in no time at all. Firefox starts up and runs much faster than Mozilla because of its significantly optimized code...

I'm going to love the new AutoDownload feature - Automatically download files to your Desktop or another location without windows popping up asking you where to save, etc. It also includes a new installer for Windows users - previously you had to manually extract the zip to a system folder.

And if that doesn't convince you to give it a try: Reasons to switch to the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Also released: Thunderbird 0.5, the e-mail and newsgroup client for 2004 and beyond.

UPDATE: The button at the top of this post is a PNG with alpha transparency, which does not render correctly in - you guessed it - Internet Explorer. Microsoft have had almost 8 years to fully implement the PNG specification yet haven't. How sad. Then again, it's taken them 6 months to release a patch for the most vulnerable security hole ever discovered in Windows.

UPDATE: 13 Reasons To Use Firefox Over IE