Until about a month ago, I hadn’t ever heard of Sir John Hegarty. He caught my attention recently in an interview on Radio 4’s Start the Week, talking about his career in advertising.
The first question that Andrew Marr put to him was: ‘What is the greatest brand in the world?’ His answer, which surprised me, was ‘The Church’. Although he was referring to the Catholic Church, he was keen to identify the cross of Christ as the most successful logo in history.
Cross logo?
‘It is a logo so simple that a child can reproduce it’, he said, ‘They could easily have adopted the sign of a fish... or a carpenter’s plane. But no, they adopted a symbol of pain and sacrifice.’ Hegarty went on to talk about the ‘real through-the-line, 360-degree thinking’ that led to churches being built in the shape of a cross. Then the churches themselves behaved in the way that all advertisers should, ‘taking their founder’s beliefs with them, they went out to convert the world’.
