An Inconvenient Rebrand Pt. II — Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bolt
For San Diego Chargers’ fans, the move to L.A. was the worst day ever. Unfortunately for the organization’s marketing team, the following week wasn’t much better either. After the Chargers announced they’d be bolting from sunny San Diego to less sunny, more star-studded L.A., they debuted a new logomark . The result? The internet hated the new logo. They hated it so much that the organization ended up redacting it, attempting to save face with a claim that that it was meant for ‘general marketing purposes.’ The controversy has since died down, but there’s something still unsettling about the grossly emotional public outcry.
Last year, we talked about how rebranding is often met with scorn even though it’s completely necessary. What was true for Instagram is true for the Chargers — releasing a new visual identity is an important step in keeping the brand fresh and signaling a move in a new direction. And from a design perspective, the new logo mark actually had some sensible logic behind it.
In other words, the internet doesn’t hate the Chargers. It hates change.
New Year, New City, New Me
This isn’t the first time a major team has moved to a new city. In fact, this isn’t even the first time an NFL franchise has moved to L.A. within the last few years. Just last season, the St. Louis Rams became the L.A. Rams, and did so without any attempt at an update to their brand. This is important.
A team with a mostly dismal record over the past decade forewent the facelift, opting to try to keep the same core spirit intact even as they switched towns. Then-coach Jeff Fisher, looking to take advantage of the “fresh” start, proclaimed with conviction that he wasn’t going 7–9 (one game under a 50% win rate) on HBO’s popular behind-the-scenes show Hard Knocks.
But there was a problem — there wasn’t anything to signify an actual fresh start. Nothing about the team had changed except where they were playing: not the coaching, not the roster, and nothing about their visual identity. Jeff Fisher turned out to be right, but in the worst possible way — they didn’t go 7–9: they went 4–12.
Something as ostensibly minor as a logo for a team might seem unimportant on the grand scale of things, but it’s not. Angus Mugford, a consultant to the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, said of team rebranding: “Changing a logo can be one way to signal that you’re changing the culture. With that, you change the motivational climate too.”
The Chargers, like the Rams before them, haven’t been exactly racking up wins over the past decade or so. So a complete overhaul of the logo — within the bounds of the team’s name, of course — might be one way to redirect the ship and help foster the feeling of a clean(ish) slate.
California Love
Something that was pointed out ad nauseum on Twitter was that the new logomark was very similar to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ (and the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Dallas Stars had their “hey this looks familiar” takes as well).
Many internet commenters looked at this as a bad thing in their search to find something concrete to blame as the abrupt change gave them an unidentifiable feeling of discomfort. But in reality, the close relationship between the logos is probably a good thing, leveraging a ton of brand equity that already exists in L.A. to give the new kids on the block a fresh injection of hype and a closer tie to the town — especially since they now have to compete with the Rams, a team which hasn’t associated themselves with L.A. in any meaningful visual capacity.
This, too, isn’t something unique to the Chargers and the Dodgers. Notice something similar about the Steelers’, Pirates’, and Penguins’ colors? Pittsburgh is small, yet all three teams have been historically (and recently) good. Most of this credit, sure, should be attributed to team operations — but the spirit and the enthusiasm generated for the three teams, and the identity of them as Pittsburgh’s own, is certainly supported by the fact that they share the same color scheme and a similar typographic style. That goes a long way in sports, and helps all three teams unify their rabid followings.
By Design
An extremely important element in design is refinement, and it’s something that virtually every sports team, brand, company, organization does (and should do).
The Miami Dolphins’ logo lineage, for example, has a clear progression. It’s easy now to look back at old versions and immediately identify them as relics of the past (or, in modern NFL parlance, throwbacks, aka another opportunity for the league to sell merch).
The Dolphins current logo is simply just a more refined, modernized iteration of a key, identifiable component. Keeping that core identity the same — while allowing just enough room for a sensible update — is exactly what the Chargers did by keeping the bolt. The symbol is the same, even if the logo is different.
More like the Los Angeles Camels
Finally, it’s very important to remember the process that runs behind the scenes.
In any type of rebrand there are many stakeholders and approvers involved in the process, each responsible for giving their feedback. Sure, Reddit had a super snarky thread that ridiculed how something so “basic” could take over a year to hatch. But as anyone in the industry will tell you, there are heaps and heaps of eyeballs, brains, thoughts, opinions and revisions that go into everything, especially in something of this scale, and where they ended up is actually quite sensible, all things considered.
Unquiet Storm Pt. II
The Chargers have already changed their Twitter avatar back to the classic wordmark that fans are used to. I’m hopeful that this was all part of a more gradual rollout, and not a reactionary decision based off of public opinion (see: Tropicana logo incident a few years back). But clearly, everyone in the organization is shook, including the poor social media intern who is having a moment of crisis-slash-reflection, going back and forth on whether or not this gig is portfolio-or-garbage material.
But while the unpopular “L.A.” lockup won’t appear on their helmets, it represents a much needed new identity, and the beginning of a fresh new opportunity for the Chargers. An opportunity that ultimately should foster optimism and hope for the future. This is something that fans should embrace rather than reject, and realize that the reason they’re so compelled to have such strong reactions is because they don’t like change — not because they don’t like the Chargers.
