Being in the branding business, you get a lot of opportunities to launch new brands and revamp others. Probably, the most ticklish of these branding assignments is the brand re-design. This is usually a high-wire tightrope journey between a new marketing director who wants to radically update their brand and a quiet hunch that there may remain truckloads of equity in the brand’s current logo design.When faced with this power struggle between the hunger for being different and the wisdom of staying the same, it is imperative to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is helpful in these situations to look at how some of the big brands have struck this important balance over the past century.
Shell Oil has a name that is so iconic that its earliest logo was the proverbial no-brainer. And as we chart the mark’s evolution we can see in many ways how the brand has moved full circle without ever straying off the path. The one thing that was added in the 1940’s was a distinct color palette from which Shell has wisely not departed.
Pepsi has had a far more checkered odyssey. For the first 50 years, they dabbled in an ornate script that spelled out the entire name. Then in the 1960’s, they shortened their moniker to put the brand on a first-name basis with their customers. Somewhere along the way, the all-red palette was probably determined to be too close to Coca-Cola. Interestingly, the Coca-Cola brand still uses their original script logo in their packaging and marketing. Hasn’t exactly held them back.
Rebranding is tricky business. If the brand is held in high esteem, be careful to hold on to all positive equity. Of course, some brands are in the process of running for the door. Here, a radical makeover is in order. After gunning down a few dozen innocent bystanders, trigger-happy security company Blackwater USA recently decided they needed more than a new logo. They needed a name change. Today, Blackwater operates under a far less controversial name–– Xe Services.
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