Do logos make a difference?

One key role played by logos is to protect the company from trademark infringement. Sometimes the name is trademark able like Raymond. In fact Gwalior as a brand was dropped by Grasim since it could not be trademarked and unscrupulous competitors were weaving the name Gwalior on their fabrics. The company moved to the Grasim brand name, which was protectable in all its forms. It is a tragedy that the Gwalior brand had to virtually disappear.

In deciding about trademark infringement, the factors usually considered by the courts are:

* The distinctiveness of the complainants mark
* The similarity of marks
* The proximity of the parity products.

A more important role played by logos is to signal the brand image telegraphically to consumers. But is there a difference between flashing the name NIKE v/s the Nike logo with the ‘swoosh’? Similarly between the name Motorola and the Motorola logo with the ‘M’?

A seminal study, done in the early 90’s with consumers in the US, attempted to study the differential impact of logos vis-à-vis just the brand name. Consumers were asked to rate brands by looking at just the name (in normal typeface). They were then asked to rate the same names presented as ‘logos’. The results published in the Design Management Journal (Winter 1993) had some interesting observations. Logos can help a brand improve its ratings by a large margin. But not all logos help brand image recognition. In fact some brand names seem to score better than their brand logos. Obviously the positive scoring logos seem to be triggering the right associations in the consumers’ minds, while the less popular logos are leaving the consumers a little perplexed.
The truth about good logos may just be that the organizations owning them have succeeded in ensuring that their logos have indeed become ‘flypaper’ of positive associations. The less successful logos may just need a lot more impetus on the consumer level to start adding to the value of those brand names.

In the Indian context it would be interesting to study how much extra the logos of companies like Raymond, Wipro and Tata add to the image scores.

Even as logos provide flypaper for associations, there are some, like Naomi Klein (acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost “alternative thinkers” after the ground breaking book No Logo) who take an antithetical view to the concept of logos – branding them as almost heretical. In her seminal work “No Logo” (Flamingo, ISBN, 2001) which the New York Times called a “movement bible,” Klein demonstrates the ubiquity of brands, addressing consumers as “walking, talking, and life-sized Tommy (Hilfiger) dolls, mummified in fully branded Tommy worlds.” She particularly chastises Nike and its trademark swooshes, calling to order culture jammers and McUnion activists. As she quotes a teen “Nike, we made you. We can break you.”