The Unbearable Banishment: Marketing 101

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Marketing 101

Quick, name this company:



and this one:

and this one:

I've spent my entire career in corporate meat-n'-potatoes graphic design. It is the wet dream of every company to develop a logo that it so beautiful in its simplicity, and so impressionable, that it becomes steeped in the public subconscious. None of the above examples contain the name of the company and yet, because they have become part of Western culture, you know which company they represent. Do you know how hard that is to achieve? Do you know how many logos dare to not include the company name? Very few. Typically, it takes years of market saturation to make a glyph mean something more than just a glyph.

That's why this...


...is pure genius. I have no idea who designed this, but Barak Obama owes him/her a deep debt of thanks. It counts for far more than you imagine. This logo hasn't been around for very long, particularly when weighed against the examples above, but it is instantly identifiable. This is one of the most effective and memorable examples of branding that I can recall in a long time and I hope they don't retire it after the election.

5 Comments:

Blogger Sid said...

Actually the only ones I could indentify were McDs and Benz.

November 3, 2008 at 12:11 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

*phew* me too. what is the middle one?

November 3, 2008 at 2:58 AM  
Blogger The Unbearable Banishment said...

My bad! I keep forgetting that I have international readers.

The middle logo is for the CBS television network. It’s one of the three primary TV networks here in the U.S. It was one of, if not the, first networks to broadcast when TV was invented. Its logo is so prevalent here that I’m betting my 7-year old and, perhaps, my 2-year old might already be able to identify it.

November 3, 2008 at 8:04 AM  
Blogger Please Don't Eat With Your Mouth Open said...

Yeah I didn't know the middle one either!

(Or the bottom one first off. Obama rang some bells though)

November 3, 2008 at 8:50 AM  
Blogger JustinS said...

I thought the same thing about the Obama logo:

http://www.neverbeencool.com/2008/09/11/we-will-we-will-barack-you/

November 3, 2008 at 11:33 AM  

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