In the world of branding, one of the major tools brand makers use is a ‘logo’. While this is very straight forward to understand, not everyone gets it right.
Most iconic brands, mega corporations and tech giants all spend a lot of money to develop, fine tune and refresh their company/brand logos from time to time. Everyone involved claim they have everything figured out on this most important asset of identity for their brand.
However, brand researchers have shown that just a few companies actually think about the long term impact of what they do with their logos and its impact on the bottom-line on the company. How it helps them to cut cost of campaigns, gain more equity and value to the brand in monetary terms.
Recently, Mastercard, the payment processing giant did something unusual with its logo. They removed the written name ‘Mastercard’ from their logo leaving behind the famous red and orange circles free of words. It is a bold move to make but many people in the branding and marketing community have condemned it. Why should a company like Mastercard cut out its name leaving colour codes?
But we think this decision is smart and Mastercard has more to gain over its competitors. The decision to use its brand’s code will not only gain brand recognition for the company but it gets its message across faster. Everybody knows it is Apple when they see ‘an apple with a bite taken out of it’.
In a riveting article, Mark Ritson said the use of codes can solve several branding problems but it adds more value to the company and its finances in the long term. He is of the opinion that we spend more time designing fonts and logos but we think the world will wait for us to get what we really mean or what we want them to do with them.
The use of codes gets more people to love us, it gets our message across better than we can imagine. It worked for Burberry, Rolls Royce and many other brands, it can work for you too.
First published on NEXTGEN, a weekly newsletter of SBI Media Limited.