Cartouches and Logos

I have a friend who suffers from a form of confusion.  He has a company and I felt it would be worthwhile if he figured out what that company was all about. In that light, we went through a branding exercise that took some time and more than a little angst. So let's talk about this for a minute as most folks think that "branding" is something to do with an iron and is hardly work and therefore not exercise.

One fellow I know who is a master at branding is Fred Seibert.  He pretty much branded MTV (or not) and was tasked with the rebranding of the Nashville Network into Spike TV. His view on the subject was pretty simple; build a big wall around your product and don't let anything in that doesn't fit..

Branding isn't a mystery. We all carry personal brands; the who we are of what we are.  Some of use are "warriors" and others are "sages".  Look around you and you can kinda judge if people are who they think they are.  We all know the person who thinks they are something that they are not (how many times have you heard that phrase!).  Companies, associations, groups, etc., all carry brands as well.  The really good ones are slavish to maintain their brands - the Fred Seibert wall - and they do what they do and nothing else; won't even consider it.

A logo is an offshoot of the brand  It is either the name of the business in some fancy print form, a combination of print and some graphic, or, it is just a graphic.  Don't get bored yet, I am getting around to cartouches.  In those three categories are:

The name or the abbreviation of the name:

 

The name and a graphic (in this case the Golden Gate Bridge in graphic)

Just the Graphic:

McDonald's case, they have nearly 20,000 locations and turn out maybe a billion pieces of paper, product, burgers, you name it a day world wide and I can tell you with 100% certainty that every piece of paper that has the golden arches is depicted almost precisely the same way.  That logo is the same as their brand - it is McDonalds and there is no mistaking it for anything else.

Somewhere along the line, IBM sat down and said how can we make a logo and they thought about it a lot and decided  that if they did it right, the three letters IBM would, over time, be enough. Cisco wanted to add a little more so they put in a graphic that represented the Golden Gate Bridge which is a logo of sorts for San Francisco - and by extension Silicon Valley and ultra high tech.  See where we are going here?

The Egyptians did logos of sorts called Cartouches.  A cartouche, to be clear, is an enclosed vertical or horizontal oval.  Inside that oval would be the essence of the person - those branding parts that depicted them/him/her.  If a person were born in the spring, had a parent who was royal, was fair and just, didn't slaughter slaves for fun, kept lions, etc., there were little graphic symbols (hieroglyphs) that were in essence words reduced to pictures.

Some folks who don't get the process and how branding evolves the logo go right to the cartouche stage which is nothing more than taking the brand attributes and listing them like the attributes in a cartouche or for that matter a totem pole.  They don't in any way distill the brand into a graphic, they just "word it" in common symbols.

When you were in 3rd grade and just getting the hang of writing love notes to that classmate 2 seats over, and you didn't want anyone else to "know" what was going on, you generally devised a secret language or pictures, pig-latin is an example, so you could say it in a language you understood but didn't have anything on earth to do with who you are or who you are or who your intended is/was - you were just writing in code so no one would figure it out or catch on.

Folks who reduce logos to cartouches - a huge jumble of graphic images that you need the Rosetta Stone to decipher - that talk about the adjectives inside an oval - don't get the idea that the cartouche needs to be a symbol rather than a translation.

Just don't get it at all.