I love how SEO rumors and myths get started. A possible new myth is to label your site "official" or "original" of product X or on the topic of Y. By doing so, the myth is that you will escape Google's Panda algorithm because it looks for unofficial sites to harm.
A HighRanking Forum thread has a person who heard from someone else that maybe if you had an official site, it would not get dinged by Panda. Taking that one step further, how does Google know which site is official and which is not. Can you put the words official on the web site to trick Google?
See where I am going?
The truth is, Google knows official brands and it knows the link structure a brand web site will have compared to those reselling those brands. It has nothing to do with Penguin or Panda. And slapping on an "official" logo on the site won't matter because most of the official web sites do not have an official label on their web site.
Forum discussion at HighRanking Forum.
