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| 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.
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.
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| 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.