I’m home sick. Not the kind of sick that means I get to stay home and watch Law & Order all day. (Alas.) But, the kind of sick that means that I can convince myself that it’s okay to skip going to the gym and that chai somehow counts as dinner… And avoiding making dinner and going to the gym means that I have time for you, my long neglected blog.
My whining is over… on the to world of branding…
Today Jezebel posted this video of a little girl reacting to famous logos.
TL;DR? Dude, it was two and a half minutes long. And guess what, Cher, Cliff’s Notes didn’t write sonnets.
Anyway, the little girl has some great (and classic) little kid reactions. Who didn’t think the McDonalds M was made out of french fries when they were little? And, she’s clearly a little yuppie in the making – recognizing two coffee brands and getting absolutely excited over the Apple logo. Yes, little girl, those are the brands that get me excited, too.
No, that's not a backwards G.
Being five, and presumably at that stage when proving that you know all the letters is very important, it’s interesting that the one letter that she’s didn’t pick out is the D for Disney. She got that it was Disney alright, but not that the logo was a letter. (A future member of the When I found out the Disney “D” WAS a “D”, it blew my mind Facebook Group.)
Go ahead and test yourself. Which ones do you know?
We did a similar exercise in my Brand Management class the other day, in which the professor flashed logos across the screen and we all had to write down the name of the brand and the first thing it made us think of. It’s a telling experiment – in some ways it reveals brand equity, but in others it’s just a Rorschach test. Does the hate you feel when you see the Wal-Mart logo say more about you or Wal-Mart?
Also, here’s a fact of the day for you: did you know that the term brand comes from cattle branding?
Questions of the day: So, how well did you do? Did you know all the brands? Also, did you know it was a D is Disney?
I new 10 of the logos and yes I knew that it was a D for Disney!
You might like Byron Stark’s “How Brands Grow”. His theory is all about creating a lighthouse for consumers with consistent “mental assets” (meaning sticky, recognizable iconography). Sounds basic, but too many brands go off course.