The Game of Logos
One of the most interesting aspects of marketing is branding. It’s simple to understand branding — let’s just say it’s how a consumer sees, understands and identifies your company. In all honesty, it’s a beautiful concept that a simple word or shapes can have such a large impact on how one decides “Yes, I want this non-sensical product that I may never use!” (Yay, consumerism!)
I want to touch upon an interesting element of branding and that’s logos. Yes, it is very convenient timing that Facebook just released a new logo, and yes, of course, I have an opinion about it — but I promise it was just a simple coincidence and a good push for me to write this article.
There are some interesting examples I would like to go through, starting with my favourite and one of the more recent ones.
Doritos are the beloved nachos brand (honestly, don’t dispute me, purple is the best). Here they were in 2019, facing the usual competition, but they were unfazed. They’ve had enough success with their ad campaigns and has been considered “bold” with most of them.
However, they decided to dig into what Generation Z is craving for — “anti branding”. Apparently, my generation is anti-consumerism and does not want “in the face ads” (yeah, right — that’s why you keep wondering if you want those boots from Amazon after their remarketing on Facebook).
According to Emerson Spartz, CEO of the digital media company Dose in an article, “Compared to any generation that has come before, they are less trusting of brands. They have the strongest bullshit filter because they’ve grown up in an era where information was available at all times.”
So what does this mean for companies? Generation Z is not going to stop buying products, but their brand loyalty depends on your open and honest communication. To put into other words, how simple it is to connect with your audience without annoying us.
So what did Doritos do? Simple — they dropped their logo, well in one way. Now it’s important to understand that Doritos did not forget their brand identity — in fact, the opposite. They understood how strong their brand identity is and how epic they are that they had the leverage of going for their “#LogoGoesHere” campaign, in August 2019. Doritos believes that it’s iconic enough to be related to a simple triangle, a super controversial shape might I add (you know, because of love triangles, Illuminati etc. ; let’s not get into that).
They went for an anti-ad. The ad features a plain red bag of chips and a plain blue bag of chips — no name, no logo, NOTHING. An ad that literally says “No logos, no jingles, no gimmicks. This is a product so iconic, we don’t need to name it”. While writing this, I can’t seem to figure out whether I love it or I think Doritos is just pretentious and full of itself.
In fact, they didn’t just stop there. They changed their Instagram name to “logo_goes_here” which had pictures of lots of triangles. Yup, they were clearly going for bold.
Did they manage to pull it off? There aren’t any articles that are commenting on the success of its campaign, but I would say….no. I mean, don’t get me wrong I found it pretty cool when I saw it, but they’ve garnered around 160K views on their video with a lot of comments that just make fun of the fact that Doritos is acting as if its Cheetos.
Is that considered viral content? Of course not. If you’re taking such a huge step, the least you can make sure of is that it goes viral. Furthermore, because of its Instagram name change, the page lost around 22,000 followers the very next day.
Where Doritos might have failed is how much they tried to promote this content, or maybe Generation Z just ended up finding them pretentious. Well, looks like their ideation might have backfired on their research.
The point of this case study is not to examine the possible failure of this campaign but actually gain insights on how far a company is ready to change their logo to stay in trend of what’s happening around them.
Keeping trends in mind, there is an obvious trend of digital payments. According to Statista, the total transaction value in the Digital Payments segment amounts to US$4,137,523m in 2019 and is said to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2019–2023) of 12.8%. These big numbers show that maybe people are gonna reduce using their cards as much as possible.
So what should a brand like Mastercard do….with the word “card” in their name! How do they remind their customers that they exist for digital payments? Yup, they change their logo, in January 2019. Mastercard made a mastermind decision (see what I did there?) of dropping the words Mastercard from their logo and keeping it simple with the iconic 2 orange and red circles, and this worked for them!
This also served the purpose of the fact that consumers are turning towards their phones for their needs, so the amount of space available to a brand to showcase their logo is reducing. By removing this element, Mastercard also capitalizes on that tiny screen all of us are so addicted to.
With this strategic move, Mastercard has joined the ranks of Nike and Apple, 2 of the most iconic brands of all time.
What is interesting is that yes, in a way what Doritos did is similar, but why was success seen from Mastercard’s side? It’s all about the numbers. Mastercard tested in multiple markets around the world and across different demographics and found that more than 80% of people were able to recognize the brand through the symbol alone, according to Mastercard Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Raja Rajamannar.
Even then, numbers weren’t what determined the success of this change. There was a purpose to change of Mastercard’s logo. Whether it was to remind their customers that they are too in the running for digital payments, or whether it was to capitalize on the usage of mobile phones. Mastercard’s masterstroke did not tick people off, whereas Doritos seems to have taken this large step only to seem bold and innovative which doesn’t serve a purpose to the increase in the awareness of their products.
I am not done with the creativity and smartness of Mastercard, bear with me, its interesting. Another trend Mastercard noted was the importance of Voice Assistance with this generation (even though we know Alexa listens to EVERYTHING). They launched something known as a sonic logo, in February 2019.
Mastercard understands that branding has to evolve over the years and just seeing the brand isn’t enough anymore. You can consider it a digital jingle, but it is what Rajamannar considers a powerful new identity to their brand.
The new work has one core, 12-second melody that Mastercard will adapt to different versions of varying lengths and instruments. The brand plans to use the sound, developed with Mike Shinoda of band Linkin Park, for things such as hold music, ringtones and point-of-sale acceptance chimes in stores. According to AdAge, Mastercard plans to boost its new audio offering with a marketing campaign starring musical artist Camila Cabello.
Mastercard is simply reacting to what is happening around them. Their cited a research the consulting firm OC&C Strategy Consultants predicted voice shopping will hit $40 billion in 2022, up from $2 billion in 2018, making it important for a brand to build a sonic logo for consumers to easily recognize them while they’re shopping for groceries through voice assistance while also binging on Netlfix (Ah, I love this generation).
From how trends can shape logos, let’s shift to how scandals can shape logos, and you know what company is synonymous with scandal, here’s looking at you Facebook!
Facebook released their new logo on November 4th which is said to be the umbrella logo for all the companies they own (and for all the companies that take your data *cue evil laughter*). Facebook wants to differentiate themselves as a parent company and Facebook the site, which makes sense considering all the problems that have occurred with the company from 2016, Facebook.com has been the star of the show. This one company could be harming how consumers feel about any other company related to Facebook such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
The sans serif font, capital letters with large spacing between the letters, also known as kerning, is said to describe the openness and clarity the company displays (reaaaallllly?). The logo also changes colours according to their main companies, Facebook’s blue, WhatsApp’s green, and the iconic Instagram gradient.
Does this change make sense? A recent survey by Pew found that only 29% of Americans correctly answered that Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook. Facebook does want people to know that some of the biggest apps they’re using are owned by the company.
Also, it can be considered a smart move to not hurt other company’s reputation just because of Facebook. Just because one apple is rotting, doesn’t mean all of them need to.
Will this make people forget all the issues faced by Facebook? Probably not — but we’ve got to just wait and see.
There’s a lot more to logos and if you want to learn more about them, you can do so with a good digital marketing training course. but I just wanted to showcase some of the big changes we’ve seen just this year with just 3 of the biggest companies. Logos might never diminish, they might always be our main identifier of a brand, what they make us feel and for marketers this provides an opportunity to play as many games as they like. Marketers are well aware of the fact that logo ka toh kaam hai kehna. It’s how they well they play this game will determine who wins.
