A colleague of mine at another company complained to me recently that the “learned consultant demigods” were recommending another logo rebranding. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid this process in the past at my company, but my previous company did one right after I left, and I’ve known a lot of colleagues at other places that have decided that a new logo is going to be their savior. From what I understand the process goes something like this:
Someone (usually the company CEO) decides that the company’s current logo is out of date and needs to be “modernized” to “keep up with the competition” and “promote company synergy.” This idea is pitched to the yes-men of the company, who naturally agree with every word of this Buzzword Bingo.
It’s immediately decided that, even if the company already has a competent marketing or PR department, this rebranding will be outsourced to an expensive specialist consultant who can “think outside the box” and “bring new energies to this dynamic process.” This has the double effect of inflating the cost of the process by hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, and making the marketing and PR department feel completely superfluous to operations.
After many checks with many zeros are sent to the consultants, the consultant returns with a set of logos for people in the company to peruse. Sometimes even the “little people” of the company get to see the ideas. Most of them are ugly and look like something a second-year graphic designer would come up if they’d forgotten to do a class project the night before it was due and whipped up something in 20 minutes. Sometimes the consultants themselves will be there to talk up their designs, fretting over how hard it was to choose between rounded corners and squared corners (despite the fact that there might be two identical designs in the set, one with rounded and the other with squared corners) and how difficult it was to pick exactly the right shade of white for the background of the logo.
Everyone will hate the new logos. There will be grumbles about the costs involved in the process and how the company has a perfectly good graphic designer who could have come up with the same ideas him/herself. People will be asked to pick a logo and things like “well Jesus Christ, I don’t know…they all look the same to me…what was wrong with the old logo…oh hell, just pick that one” will be heard.
Eventually with much fanfare a new logo will be unveiled. Everyone will hate it. In fact, it will often be the one everyone liked the least. The CEO will be on hand to talk about how the new logo represents “a bold turning point in the future of our company…it demonstrates the forward-looking nature of where we want to be…blah blah blah.” The CEO will not even look at the logo for more than a few seconds. Within hours everyone will be forced to change all their stationery, templates, promotional materials, and everything that even hinted at the old logo, which all ends up costing the company even more money. (These added costs are always a complete shock to the CEO later.)
Everything goes on exactly as it had before. The employees miss the old logo and might still “accidentally” use it. Customers either are completely indifferent or actively dislike the new logo. Customer focus groups, if anyone bothers to consult them, say the same thing. Nobody bothers to do any data analysis to see if there was measurable ROI on the logo process. If the company bottom line improves, the logo (which, of course, was the CEO’s idea entirely) gets the credit; if it doesn’t, other factors will be blamed and the costliness of the new logo will be quickly forgotten.
A few years later, the company gets a new CEO and one of their first thoughts is “Our logo could use some updating…”
Now I understand that sometimes, logos are so outdated (remember The Gap’s old logo that was ridculously outdated in the 70s which they still held onto through the 80s?) that they just have to go. And sometimes a logo might be culturally insensitive, or a company is going through a merger or complete rebranding and it needs to have a new look. But from what I can see, many successful companies don’t change their logo very much. Coca-Cola has pretty much the same logo they started with 100 years ago. Apple has had some minor tweaks to their logo, but their logo at the beginning is still immediately recognizable as the one they have now. Target has had almost exactly the same logo for its entire 50-year existence.
So what gives with companies that are changing logos every five years or so? Is there really any demonstratable proof that a logo change–especially a logo change absent any other advertising or product change–justifies its large costs on even a few occasions? I have to say that I have often heard colleagues saying “Christ, another logo rebranding,” but not once heard them say, “Gee, since this logo change our sales are way up!” Or is changing a logo just an easy way for a CEO to say, “See, I did something! Now how about those stock options?”
I can’t speak to all the nuance of the OP (who seems to know a lot about the process) but I’ve said for years that Sherwin Williams is in desperate need of a logo makeover.
The current logo invariably (for me) invokes an image of an oil spill, polluted environment, dead wildlife… and I can’t imagine that in a post Exxon Valdez/Deepwater Horizon world I’m the only one with this reaction… ISTM that if anyone needed to update their logo, it would be them.
Well, any branding consultant worth his/her salt will tell you that branding is SO much more than the logo.
The institution for which I work just recently went through a hideously expensive rebranding. The language describing the colors we are to use just make me shake my head:
"Energetic. Bold. Adventurous
Warm gold, fresh lime, dense teal, sweet berry, and smooth pebble move quickly and speak to hip, creative types. A bold baseline flows beneath these pairings of richness and unexpected candor. A little tart, a little sweet, with a world of possibilities ahead." :rolleyes:
I have not drunk the Kool-Aid on this one. The classic definition of branding is “the process of creating a relationship or a connection between a company’s product and emotional perception of the customer for the purpose of generation segregation among competition and building loyalty among customers.” And warm gold, fresh lime, and dense teal are going to do this?
I’m obeying the rules because I’m tired of getting my hand slapped for producing “off-brand” materials. But I remain highly skeptical that any of this is going to establish a relationship or build loyalty with our customers.
I don’t think companies rebrand as often as you might perceive. Most major companies revamp about every 15-20 years. Some troubled ones will fall for a marketing firm’s ploy on a more frequent schedule - “Yes! If you change your logo your entire market will come back from Amazon.com/WalMart/Home Depot!”
I think you are confusing the number of rebrandings in any given year with the period between such changes by any one company.
(Then there’s NeXT computer, which spend $100k unveiling their new logo before they’d written any code or built a single prototype… that worked out well.)
At the Purple Arrow Pointing Up And To The Right Screen Door Company, they’re going crazy trying to come up with a logo, and nobody has any ideas. No ideas at all.
Really, I love that – Target has had almost exactly the same logo for its entire 50-year existence.
I don’t know why companies have to do this as much as they do. I agree, if your logo is so anachronistic that it’s offensive (Aunt Jemima comes to mind), well, then you have to. But mostly, messing with the symbols people are supposed to recognize you by sounds to me like what you do when you’re trying to make people forget how you behaved. I take logo fiddling to suggest that there might be something unsavory about the firm.
…and I assume by “worked out well,” you mean: “Were acquired–along with Steve Jobs–and saved Apple, virtually replacing their existing OS and team, laying the foundation for both Mac OS X and iOS,–two of the most successful operating systems of all time, and still in use (NS prefix intact) to this day on hundreds of millions of devices?”
Although I do doubt that it was the logo that did it.
I like how the linked discussion comes right out and says they did the other logo changes because display technology improvements allowed it. I always wondered if they just added crap thoughtlessly because some new graphic driver provided code that allowed it, but it’s amazing they’d actually come right out and say so, like that’s not the worst reason for changing a design.
Shazam, which has ATMs in the Midwest, has had the same logo for nearly 30 years. I remember it vividly because I temped at the company prior to their launch, and had to put together hundreds of information packets.
I vaguely recall that Landers Associates charged about $1M for the Lucent branding, including that imbecilic Lucent logo, which inspired the Dilbert cartoons. (Scott Adams used to work for the phone company, prior to the Lucent spin off). The analogy that Lucent employees favored was a bit more off-color than a coffee stain.
Why yes, of course. How could you count limping through six or seven years of irrelevance only to be available for acquisition when Jobs and Apple worked out their differences and bring a mostly derivative code base into the mix anything but a wild success?
My point was that Next was like a zillion lesser-known VC follies: They blew a huge amount of their initial capital padding out “the company” before they actually turned to, you know, a salable product. And, as you pointed, succeeded only for a very narrow interpretation of “salable.”
I had nothing to do with Next but I was involved with a dozen other companies that blew the remainder of their VC sitting around, looking at their kewl and very expensive logo and talking about how great they were going to be. Next was the only one to have a mini-documentary made about the event.
When Toyota changed to their current logo a number of Toyota corporate employees though the new logo looks like a sombrero and thought it might have been stolen from Taco Bell.
