What's in the logo?
Saurabh Mishra
Amazon | design-thinking.in | Strategy | Product Management | Agile Program Management | Analytics and Automation | Product Marketing | Operations Management | Ex-Volvo | Ex-Tata | IIMA
On 5th Jun 2018, “Ogilvy & Mather”, the iconic Advertising agency, dumped its 19-year-old logo - the signature of its founder and the legendary adman David Ogilvy, in a bid to globally re-brand its identity. The old logo, which was adopted in 1999 as a tribute to its founder, is replaced with a new emblem designed in customized red-color ligatures and fonts. The question is what compelled the Ad giant to change its logo? For that matter, why any company changes its logo? Is it only an advertising tactic or a strategic move to subtly communicate a message to the market (we call it “Signalling” in economics term) or both? Let’s understand this by digging into the detail of what all changed at “Ogilvy & Mather” along with the change in its logo.
Over the past two decades, “Ogilvy & Mather” expanded enormously through its breadth and depth under various business arms and sub-brands such as Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, OgilvyOne, Ogilvy PR, Social Ogilvy and Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide. However, as the current CEO, John Seifert, puts it - "the organization grew too complicated over time by carving up its services to meet disparate client needs until it reached a tipping point in which 14 specialists would walk into a room with slightly different Ogilvy business cards. No one is going to buy us if they don’t understand us.” He describes the new change as signifying the “re-founding” of the organization and the “brand re-positioning” from an “advertising agency” to an “integrated creative network” that “Makes Brands Matter”. The change brought all the divisions and sub-brands under a unified brand of “Ogilvy” and organized them under 12 “Crafts” and 6 “Core capabilities” as defined below:
- Crafts: Creative, Strategy, Deliver, Client Service, Data, Finance, Technology, Talent, Business Development, Marketing & Communications, Administrative, and Production
- Core Capabilities: Brand Strategy, Advertising, Customer Engagement & Commerce, PR & Influence, Digital Transformation, and Partnerships
The new 6 brand values are created as “Divine Discontent, Relentless Curiosity, Adaptive Connection, Pervasive Creativity, and Eternal Craft”. The change also promises the flatter organizational structure and increased women employees in the group.
These are the transformational changes envisioned with the objective of presenting a new, unified face of Ogilvy - more dynamic, more collaborative, more creative and more modern, yet connected to its heritage. Therefore, the question is how to let the world know that the organisation is transforming? How to let the world know that the organisation is more than ready to take up the challenges of emerging customer needs with better efficiency? The answer lies in “Change the Visual identity of the brand”. And, since the “Logo” is the most prominent and significant part of a brand's visual identity, "Change the Logo of the brand". A logo plays the most important role in defining the brand's identity and thereby connecting to the people's mind, heart and hand (to think, feel and do). Defined as the "purposive combination of texts, images, symbols, and/or colors", a logo plays five critical roles for a brand:
- Brand differentiation: A logo serves as a quickest mean for both the customer and the company to differentiate a particular brand and its products from that of the others.
- Brand recognition and recall: A good logo remains in the memory of the customers for long, thereby enabling easy brand recognition and recall under various buying environments. Nike's 'swoosh', McDonald's 'golden arch', Apple's 'bitten apple', Mercedes Benz's 'triangle star' are few of the world's best logos known for their instant brand recognition and recall.
- Brand personality and behaviour: Every element of a logo - the texts, images, symbols, and colors it uses, has its own significance in defining the brand personality and behavior. The big eight brand colors associate themselves with different brand personalities. Similarly, different fonts (typefaces) signify different brand personalities and behavior. Refer below figures.
- Business information: A logo, by using the visual cues, has the ability to communicate a lot about the business. As for example. the Amazon's logo with an arrow that points from the “A” to the “Z” in its name, symbolizes that a customer can find anything and everything they need (from A to Z) at Amazon.
- Brand loyalty: A logo helps to create the brand loyalty by enabling easy associations under different situations and contexts. It's a tool that a customer can hold on to if they want to resonate with the brand's identity. For example, the brand logo of "Harley Davidson" has transcended beyond the bike and is found on the diversified merchandises e.g. T-shirts, jackets, biking gears etc. It has enabled the brand to create a huge community of loyal customers.
Therefore, any change in the brand's logo automatically influences the perception of the brand and the business. That's the reason that the 'logo' is the first thing a company works on when they undergo such transformational changes. It is the best way to communicate to the maximum set of people in a concurrent manner about the transformation the organization has gone through. At the minimum, it alludes/signals to the people that something about the organization has changed, which may evoke their feelings about the brand or tempt them to know more about the change.
Ogilvy tried to communicate maximum messages through the change in its visual identity and the logo. The “gi” ligature that catches the maximum attention symbolises both the “creativity” and the “connected” aspect of the brand - “Creativity” as the core value of the brand and “Connected” as the behaviour of the organization - internally and with the clients. This ligature truly represents the new brand positioning of the organisation as "integrated creative network". The next two ligatures “il” and “vy” are smooth connections between the fonts, suggesting “natural flow” (ease of working with the organisation) and “connected”(integrated behaviour of the organisation). The new logo fonts, customized as Ogilvy Serif and Ogilvy Sans, are used with brighter Pantone red and a subtler color palette including grey, pink, blue and yellow. These changes symbolize Ogilvy’s desire to be more dynamic and modern while maintaining its heritage. The new colour scheme, which is towards the pinkish side, also implies organisation’s plan to promote more women to partner with the organisation.
What we observe here is that there are multiple messages encapsulated in what prima facie appears as a mere logo change of an organization. The change of the logo is the most powerful signal sent to the market about the undergone transformation or the re-defined positioning of the brand. Another example is India's telecom giant Bharti Airtel, who, in the year 2010, introduced its new logo timed with the introduction of its 3G services in India and acquisition of a global firm Zain Telecom operating in 15 African countries. The new logo was intended to reposition the brand as more youthful, energetic, dynamic and approachable and was symbolised by the uniform use of bright red color and the lowercase fonts (as against the combination of black, white and red colors and use of capital "A" font in the earlier logo).
Therefore, the next time we see a company changing its logo and visual identity, we can confidently tell that a lot more has changed about the organisation and the brand, than mere the texts, images, fonts, and colors.
References:
https://www.ogilvy.com/feed/wsj-ogilvy-rebrands-and-restructures-to-simplify-its-offerings/
SMIPL I Ex-TVS I Ex-HMSI I Ex-Volvo Trucks India(VECV)
6 年Well penned and very informative ?
Sales Leader | Scaling Revenue & Market Share | GTM | New Offerings | New Markets | Analytics | Gen AI/ML | SaaS | Services
6 年Awesome write up friend. Do keep writing.
Head of Marketing I Startups | Full-funnel Growth Marketer
6 年Brilliant article Saurabh. Never associated re-creation of company's logos to the organizational transformation and re-structuring in such a manner. A whole new perspective to minute elements of logos and the stories behind it.?
Principal Technical Services | Supply Chain Software Implementation | Integration Specialist | Customer Success | SaaS | C-DAC
6 年Awesome article... such a different view thought on Logo changes...thanks for sharing with us.
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