Mar 12, 2010
Have you seen Logorama, the movie comprised entirely of animated logos, that just won the Oscar for best animated short film? It's an excellent representation of the technicolor tapestry of branding that our world has become. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on your point of view. But what would the world be like if there were no more brands to differentiate products, inspire us, or give us a good feeling about a company or product we've never tried before? I'm one who thinks it would be bad for brands to meld together into a homogenized mess, and I see that starting to happen in places. At the rate things are going, someday soon all brands will look like Walmart 's Great Value label.
Why is this happening?
Mar 11, 2010
If there is anyone that learned the branding lesson imparted by the Obama ’08 Campaign, it was John McCain. During the Presidential race there was simply nothing the McCain identity could do to help his chances, especially not Optima, not even at its boldest. Not long after the loss, McCain announced in November of 2008 that he would be running for re-election to his Senate seat in 2010 for the state of Arizona. Earlier this year, McCain presented a new identity for this particular campaign, created by Phoenix-based OVO. What a difference one lost Presidential race makes.
Noreen O'Leary
Mar 1, 2010
Caribou Coffee, a distant No. 2 in the coffee chain category next to Starbucks, is attempting to bolster its appeal as a branded coffee company by playing down the ski lodge imagery and, yes, the caribou, with a sweeping rebranding.
The push, which includes a new logo and print work, comes as the brand attempts to foster a more contemporary, less regional image. With locations in 15 Midwestern and Eastern states, Caribou doesn’t have the national retail footprint of Starbucks and has a fraction of the marketing budget. But it is known for its quality—Consumer Reports ranked it No.1 among java purveyors—and a new management team wants to expand upon that and build a national presence. One way to do that is by rolling out branded ground coffee on other retailers’ shelves. Such sales rose 77 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, per the company. Caribou is now in 7,000 U.S. grocery stores.
Andrew Hampp
Feb 15, 2010
No one has seen more changes to the MTV brand than Judy McGrath. The CEO of MTV Networks started with the network in 1981 as a copywriter and eventually ascended the ranks to her current position in 2004, where she has seen many different iterations of the network and its programming even as fellow pioneering executives such as Tom Freston and Robert Pittman have come and gone.
One of those changes came as recently as last week, when MTV unveiled the first major on-air update to its logo in its 28-year history. The redesign was met with mixed reaction. "I don't think what they did is wrong," George Lois, creator of the network's historic "I want my MTV" campaign, told Ad Age. "I think what they did is strategic. And it just proves to me that MTV is dead."
Feb 10, 2010
Last year, exactly around this time, when we were thinking about what brand to spoof on April Fools MTV was the runner-up, but only because we thought no one would ever believe that the MTV logo would change. Ever. Now that the time of change is finally here — almost 29 years after MTV and its logo, debuted on August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m., to that unmistakable guitar riff — well, not much has really changed, other than what we all already knew. MTV is not about music anymore, and its new logo dispenses with the hindering description of “Music Television.”
Feb 4, 2010
There is no Sunday like Super Bowl Sunday: The friends, the beer, the chips, the bets, the ads… and, oh yeah, the game. And just in case you were confused by this year’s Pro Bowl being played before the Super Bowl, heed the news, the Super Bowl is this Sunday in Miami, Florida with the New Orleans Saints playing the Indianapolis Colts. But aside from mentioning the obvious, let us turn our attention to the Super Logo, designed this season by Attik.
Jan 22, 2010
I was sitting in church last week, fighting distraction because there was a brand in my face.
Specifically, it was North Face—their logo emblazoned on four jackets, all within 3 rows of me and all in my line of sight. I even sneaked out my iPhone and tried to capture a picture of these four very different style/color jackets (alas, it didn’t come out very well).
Jan 19, 2010
It’s no secret that I do not — repeat, do not — enjoy the design stylings of Microsoft. But that’s like a 5-year-old saying he or she does not like broccoli, except for the fact that not even with age does the Microsoft taste become acquired. Part of these raging feelings against Microsoft are fostered by their applications that defy user-interface standards of comfort and friendliness. Granted, this is mostly for us, designers, for whom the mere sight of an Excel, Word or PowerPoint file can bring us to our knees, as we struggle to find something as natural as the letter-spacing option.
Armin
Jan 13, 2010
I gave myself a deadline of January 15 to do a recap of identity work in the 2000s, assuming that it wouldn’t be an editorial faux pas to do a list of this sort well into the new year. So here it is. An admittedly incomplete — it would take months to do this exhaustively — compilation of the most relevant identities of the past decade. The choices are listed chronologically and there is no ranking system, they are simply there as records of the corporations, products and services that shaped the decade and the identities that helped (or didn’t help) shape their perception in consumers’ eyes and minds.
Dec 29, 2009
2009 has been a great year for Brand New, with a bottomless source of new and redesigned identities from around the world, and we’ve all had good fun critiquing them in sickness and in health. But it all comes down to this: The Best and Worst. I have gone through all the archives and selected the top 12 in each category. There were some dead-ringers for each category and some that required a little more self-deliberation acknowledging that some identities were left off the list. And just as well, I know my selections may incite some disagreements, which are more than welcome as we bring this year to a close.
Nov 23, 2009
AOL unveiled a "new brand identity" Sunday night.
Instead of AOL, it's "Aol." -- period included. There are also six new logos -- from a goldfish to a paint swirl. A spokesperson says more are coming.
All of it is the result of work with brand consultant Wolff Olins, which AOL hired over the summer.
AOL is spinning off from parent company Time Warner this December. Last week, it told employees it needs 2,500 of them to volunteer for layoffs. The company plans to turn itself into a next generation media company, building on the 80 or so blogs and content sites it already runs.
Nov 5, 2009
The Kayak.com travel search engine is hoping to "flip" from a well-kept secret among frequent travelers to a tool used by mainstream travelers every day.
After discovering earlier this year that 68% of consumers who use online travel sites had never heard of Kayak, the company decided to focus on marketing.
This week, Kayak is launching its first national advertising campaign on TV, online and outdoors, created by its new agency of record, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. The creative features the tagline: "Search one and done," a device that resembles the traditional destination/time flip display boards once found in train stations and airports around the world, and a new logo based on this "flippy" device.
Oct 29, 2009
Northfield-based Kraft Foods Inc. said Wednesday that it plans to phase out use of the "Smart Choices" logo, an industry-led nutrition labeling initiative that federal food regulators last week implied could mislead consumers.
Packaged-foods rivals General Mills, Kellogg and Unilever also said this week that they plan to phase out the Smart Choices label, which was unveiled a year ago and formally launched in grocery stores in August.
Late last week, the Smart Choices program said it would "postpone" operations, and Kraft said then that it had no plans to stop putting it on products where it already appeared.
Sep 24, 2009
Founded 90 years ago, with a modest hotel in Cisco, Texas, Hilton Hotels now encompass 3,300 properties in 77 countries through ten different brands, including Waldorf Astoria, Hilton, Doubletree, Embassy Suites, and Hampton Inn & Suites, among others. This amalgam of hospitality powerhouses was most recently known as The Hilton Family but as of yesterday, it will be going by the more corporate Hilton Worldwide. The name, and identity change designed by Landor, coincide with the move of their headquarters from glitzy Beverly Hills to, um, non-glitzy McLean, Virginia.
Sep 21, 2009
"Intel Inside" was the first, and arguably the best, "ingredient" branding to come out of Madison Avenue. And thanks to that campaign everyone knows that Intel chips are inside computers.
But the success of that ad push, which made its debut in 1991, created an image of Intel as a staid chipmaker.
Sep 17, 2009
When it comes to yogurt I have no brand allegiance. Whatever brand happens to cross my line of vision that does not look like it will taste like creamy acid, I will grab. Granted, I don’t eat much yogurt, so I have no problem in brand continuity. Same thing with milk, whatever the house brand is at the grocery store near my home at the moment is the one I buy. For a while, in the halcyon economic times of 2007, we bought organic milk. Prior to writing this post, if you had asked me what brand of organic milk I bought I would not have been able to tell you. It was only as I was going through Stonyfield Farm’s web site that I realized the $5 gallon of milk I had been buying was Stonyfield Farms. This is not a knock on this particular brand but perhaps just my perception of the dairy category: A blurry landscape of cows, prairies and fruit drawings. Most likely, I’m not the target audience. Having said all this, Stonyfield Farm stands out from the crowd as a cow- and earth-conscious company since its modest beginning in 1979 as The Rural Education Center until 1983 when they began (pun alert!) milking their expertise and killer yogurt recipe as a consumer product. Today it is one of the most successful organic dairy product lines in the market, and it recently launched a new identity and packaging designed by Webb Scarlett deVlam.
Sep 16, 2009
Would you tattoo a brand name to your skin?
A new company does just that. MyBrandz.com is a new start up that offered free tattoos of brands on September 7th ("Free Tattoo Day") to people who really want to "live the brand." One of the founders says:
We'd like to let the people do what they want with the brands, enjoy the life of the brands and not only buy them and let the brand owners tell them what to with them.
The real attraction here is that consumers get more control over the brand names they love, rather than simply becoming walking billboards for them.
Sep 4, 2009
AOL is calling on Leo Burnett USA to help reinvent the brand and give the internet giant a new corporate identity as it prepares to spin off from Time Warner and emerge as an independent, publicly traded firm later this year.
The move comes after AOL in July quietly reached out to five agencies, a mix of large, traditional ad firms and small design shops, in what AOL Chief Operating Officer Kim Partoll calls "a very accelerated pitch process."
Sep 3, 2009
Volkswagen-owned car marque Audi is changing its logo for the first time since 1990, to reflect a more 'pure and clear' identity and to emphasis the brand's focus on design.
Aug 30, 2009
Thumbing through his local Swedish newspaper, Göteborg resident Mattias Akerberg found himself troubled by a full-page advertisement for Ikea. It wasn't that the Grevbäck bookcases looked any less sturdy, or that the Bibbi Snur duvet covers were any less colorful, or even that the names given to each of the company's 9,500 products were any less whimsical. No, what bothered Akerberg was the typeface. "I thought that something had gone terribly wrong, but when I Twittered about it, people at their ad agency told me that this was actually the new Ikea font," he recalls. "I could hardly believe it was true."
Aug 27, 2009
Summer may be winding down but the Good Humor truck is here to stay. The popular ice cream maker you might remember from such frozen hits as Strawberry Shortcake, Toasted Almond and Chocolate Eclair launched a rebrand earlier this year. It will adorn snack cart umbrellas, swimming pool menus and packages in the freezer aisle. But where’s the heart?
Aug 15, 2009
It can invigorate a company's image or squander its brand equity. To see which gambles paid off, Fortune turned to a few experts to judge some of the most dramatic transformations.
Aug 7, 2009
Providence, RI now has a new slogan -- "Creative Capital" -- and a logo, thanks to a $100,000 gig with a branding firm that specializes in helping communities respond to the drastic downturn in employment, investment, and solvent home mortgages with image marketing.
If I find out that any Stimulus funds are getting spent on this nonsense, count me in as a parade leader when we march on Washington.
Jul 28, 2009
Graphic designers (UnderConsideration LLC), authors, and Internet instigators Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio recently closed their influential design blog Speak Up and left New York to set up shop in Austin, Texas. Besides the fact that their mortgage now nets them double the square-footage, not much has changed for the husband-and-wife team: They still run several blogs, including the popular branding blog Brand New, work for clients, and write books, including their newest, Graphic Design Referenced, published by Rockport. The highly-visual guide highlights the industry's technical terms, historical moments, and influential practitioners with over 2,000 projects, so we asked Vit and Gomez-Palacio to dig out the 12 juiciest stories about our favorite brands for some salacious summer design reading. Enjoy!
Jul 21, 2009
Mainstream brands such as Godrej, Shoppers Stop, India Post and CEAT Tyres have undertaken rebranding initiatives to shed their old corporate images and position themselves in a new, more modern light. Some have simply upgraded their logos, while others dug much deeper. Which leads branding enthusiasts to wonder, just what is the difference between an identity refresher and a true rebranding—and when is one, and not the other, needed?
Jul 16, 2009
The question is not whether a name or logo is important. The important question to ask -- about any and all aspects of your brand -- is: is it appropriate for the feelings that I want people to conjure up and the subsequent decisions which they'll ultimately make?
Bill Gardner
Jul 9, 2009
These are austere times, but the logos recently loaded onto Logo Lounge.com–nearly 35,000 since 2008 – certainly do not reflect it, writes Bill Gardner. And that is how it should be. Wary homage may be paid to marketing in lean times, but not to identity design. These are two wholly different efforts with different goals. Identities should set a long-term course for clients, not fall into the pits carved out by economic phases.
Our seventh annual logo trend report, as always, is as much a forecast as it is a study of the past 12 months. The past informs the future, and the recent past has such momentum that designers would be well-advised to stay this course, even when clients are only maintaining the brands they have, not creating new ones. Business may be slow, but it does not have to be dull.
Jul 3, 2009
“Make it bigger,” the executive screamed from the corner of the room as I desperately sought a sign-off for an ad featuring a major fashion brand. This wasn’t the first time such a situation came up. In fact, every meeting I had always ended up in discussions about the placement and size of the logo – it was as if that one by one inch space, over time, had become the holy grail of branding – the rest was more a less an ad-on.
Martin Lindstrom
Jun 15, 2009
I guess you’ll have heard about the Versace hotel, the Ferrari laptop, and the Apple cell phone. Yet, had I suggested any one of these products to you fifteen years ago, you might have been forgiven for thinking that a few extravagant typos had made it past the editor. Yet today, we’ve become perfectly used to extreme brand extensions like these.
But, can you go too far? Brands have been stretching their way into such new and unexpected product categories that some product progeny can be impossible to link to their brand parents.
Jun 3, 2009
ConAgra Foods has unveiled a new logo, following in the footsteps of food giant Kraft, which also underwent a logo change earlier this year. ConAgra, however, faces a different challenge.
May 29, 2009
As if we needed any more proof that the venerable patron saint of mass consumer design, Target, attracts designers, my inbox has been jumping with designer e-mails about the new look and name of its private label brand: Up & Up. The chunky arrow logo is replacing Target’s red bulls eye in all the products in the health and beauty care category, from diapers to sunscreen lotions. As CNNMoney, one of the first to pick up the story, reports, the new design is just beginning to be rolled out and by the end of the year there will be 800 Up & Up products, which are typically priced 30% below brand names. And in this rough economic times, 30% less to pay for anything is, well, right on target.
Brad VanAuken
May 24, 2009
“We thought we’d update the logo a little.” “It’s not a new tagline. It’s just a catchy phrase that we are using instead of the tagline.” “We thought the icon would make a great decorative element.” “We are thinking about creating a new name for the organization.” “We developed a new product so we created a new brand for it.” “We created a different tagline for each audience. Pretty clever, huh?” “We were getting so tired of the old logo.” “It’s more fun to present the brand in a wide variety of colors.” “There was no room for the icon so we left it off.” “This is a funky stylized version of the logo targeted at younger audiences.”
What is it about marketers that cause them to want to create something new all of the time?
May 22, 2009
Copenhagen’s clever new campaign has a huge range. Open Copenhagen is designed to transcend and reinforce promotional efforts for tourism, business, events, investments, and more. Previously, each rogue group boosted their similar programs independently without any coordinated brand to tie it all together. OPEN COPENHAGEN arrives at a time when the city’s northern european neighbor cities have launched similarly rhetorical proposals to would-be visitors — I AMSTERDAM deploys a similar wordplay.
May 14, 2009
With all the commotion about Pepsi's recent makeover of its brand, you would think a new, fully global effort would try to strip out its old logo from every nook and cranny of the globe. Think again.
Mar 17, 2009
Jack has risen, hallelujah. After being hit by a bus in a Super Bowl TV/Web commercial Feb. 1, Jack -- the grand-tete CEO-mascot of Jack in the Box -- emerged from his coma March 4, newly inspired. At Jack's direction, the San Diego-based restaurant chain will undertake a brand makeover this spring, including a new logo (Duffy & Partners, Minneapolis), redesigned store environments and a new corporate website that launched Monday.
Mar 4, 2009
Forget the Nike Swoosh or the Starbucks Mermaid. Get ready for the ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) circle!
Feb 25, 2009
Without much fanfare — nor an update to their web
site and much less a press release — Jack in the Box has been slowly
updating their restaurants in San Diego, where they are headquartered.
Feb 17, 2009
Kraft Foods today unveiled a new corporate logo and brand identity,
a move analysts say could better position the food company against
private label goods.
Feb 17, 2009
One of the hardest challenges is reinvigorating a brand and visual
identity without changing the logo, it's as if you were trying to do a
fashion makeover with a pair of jeans that have been in the closet for
years. To continue the lame jeans analogy: A good pair of jeans goes
well with everything, so MoMA's simple, iconic logo is prime material
for building around it.
Feb 11, 2009
A leaked pdf outlines the thinking behind the controversial new Pepsi
logo. It may be one of the most ridiculous things ever perpetrated by
somebody calling himself a designer.
Jan 29, 2009
Has Pepsi aligned its marketing graphics and rhetoric too closely with
that of President Obama's election campaign? That issue has been
ricocheting around the blogosphere of late and Pepsi brands chief Frank
Cooper officially addressed it as part of the company's pre-Super Bowl
press conference this week. At one point, Mr. Cooper almost seemed to
suggest that the Obama campaign may have found the inspiration for its
own logo in Pepsi's marketing images -- rather than visa-versa.
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Jan 15, 2009
Since the roll out of Pepsi-Cola's new smiley-face-type logo and
optimistic-themed campaign, plenty have drawn comparisons between it
and President-elect Barack Obama's message. The soft-drink giant will
solidify that connection with a major presence in Washington during
next week's inauguration festivities.
Jan 14, 2009
The Bank of America Corporation will call its securities brokerage business Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and continue to use the bull logo, the bank said in a memo to employees Tuesday.
Davis Thinking
