Logos (not Legos) and Cartouches

An early brand logo

I have a female friend who suffers from a form of confusion.  She has a Canadian company and I felt it would be worthwhile if she figured out what that company was all about BEFORE she tried to market in the United States. In that light, we went through a branding exercise that took some time and more than a little angst. What could have been fruitful turned out to be a barren tree.

 

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 re- branding 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 belong.

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:

In 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, same color, same same.  That logo is their brand - it is McDonalds and there is no mistaking it for anything else.

The attributes to put in a cartouche

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.

Folks who reduce logos to cartouches - a huge jumble of graphic images that you need the Rosetta Stone to decipher - and then 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.

My Canadian friend is still in Canada, trying to head south to our market, and hasn't.