This may be stating the obvious but, as a multi-millionaire global franchise, marketing and branding for the WWE is crucial. How you project yourselves to your consumers is incredibly important, especially when professional wrestling is nowhere near at the level it was 20 years ago. Especially with the new brand split, it’s important for the WWE to promote the idea that RAW and SmackDown! are going to be two completely different shows. The commentators are even saying the right things, with Michael Cole on the RAW before the draft plugging next week edition as a whole new RAW. The WWE are supposed to convince you that all of this is new, since this is the “New Era” of WWE. Despite the “efforts” to true and making everything seem new, there’s still an old-school mindset which will result in WWE never truly moving on with the times.
Having started writing this on Saturday, I saw the WWE reveal two new logos for the two new brands. There was one for RAW and one for SmackDown! I actually found out about the news from @sltdwrestling on Instagram and my first reaction was “what the heck is that?”. I saw these two logos and I just couldn’t believe my eyes. The SmackDown! Live logo was I think leaked or revealed a few days before, so I knew about that. The big issue with that logo, in my opinion, is that it looks almost like a complete copy of the Impact Wrestling logo. This RAW logo, however, looked completely unprofessional in my eyes. A fan even tweeted me on Twitter saying that a it looked like a really bad fan made logo. When I first saw the logo, I thought that it was a fan made creation!
Following this discovery, I talked to some people on Facebook about these logos. Somebody responded to me by saying that the RAW logo looks like a modern version of the original RAW logo from 1993. There’s like a million things wrong with that, but the biggest comes from that old school mentality. If this was the intention of the production team for this brand logo, to make it look like a modern version of the original RAW logo from 1993, then what’s new about it?
This is going to come off as a complete contradiction on my part, but trust me when I tell you that it isn’t. When I saw the podiums for the WWE draft, with the SmackDown! podium featuring the old SmackDown! logo from 2003, I was over-the-moon. When I thought that they were going to go with the old logo for this new draft, I was all for it. With that said, the WWE’s intentions to make this all new are hindered by the fact that the actual new logos don’t come of as new. I know I mentioned that I would have loved the old SmackDown! logo from 2003, but that would be if WWE just told us that this whole brand extension has been done before.
Maybe if they would have had the old logo with Shane McMahon and Daniel Bryan talking about how this logo represented SmackDown! at its peak. Like in 2016, SmackDown! were the underdogs going up against the flagship show RAW. However, SmackDown! proved to be the much better show and this logo was a reminder of their excellence. Shane and Daniel talk about how their bringing back this logo as we want to show that WWE has grown from strength to strength in terms of talent. Not only will they provide excellence live on SmackDown! on Tuesdays, but they will do their very best to surpass the precedent set by that program ten years. They will bring something new and fresh, with this new logo motivating them to always think of a way to do things better. If they were to acknowledge that things were great ten years ago, but express a desire to put on a much better show, I think having old logos would be delightful.
However, this is a company that tries to tell you that everything is new. These logos aren’t new and original, nor do they stand out enough to be able to get away with borrowing elements of the past. Mick Foley even talked on the RAW before the brand split about how the Attitude Era was so great and this brand split was just like the Monday Night Wars. It’s a strange atmosphere where they try to tell you that everything is the same but new at the same time. They have to appeal to old-school wrestling fans, as a large portion of their fan base are adults who watched wrestling for years. However, they also are trying to tell you that things are different. Remember when they recreated the Montreal Screwjob? It was the same angle from 1997 but they tried to convince you that this was never done before, as the commentators were baffled about what was going on. It was as if Michael Cole, Byron Saxton and JBL all forgot about one of the biggest angles in WWE history. They didn’t forget but they had to try and convince you that this was all new.
I’m all for providing nostalgia moments in WWE. However, nostalgia can’t control the future of WWE. Even if nostalgia is a big aspect of the show, try not to insult the audience’s intelligence by trying to convince us that this is new. If they ever did a rematch of Jose Aldo vs Conor McGregor in UFC and McGregor knocks out Aldo again in 13 seconds, you really think Joe Rogan would not reference that this is deja vu from their last fight? No, because he would not try to insult our intelligence by trying to make the fans believe that this finish had never been done before. If you’re going to try and convince the audience that this is a “new era” for WWE, do your best to at least make it seem that it is new.
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