Brand Identity

Brand identity runs far wider than the logo. 

 Most of the time someone meets your brand, they are looking at the color, the type, the photography, the way things are spaced on a page. The logo is one member of the cast. The whole system is what people actually feel.

Episode 6 is a walk through that system: the marks, the type, the imagery, the spacing, and the small rules that let people recognize you from a thousand feet with the logo nowhere in sight. We have some fun with the hidden ones (the FedEx arrow, the Amazon smile, the bear tucked in the Toblerone mountain), talk about why identity tends to break at the system and not the logo, and why, if you are already spending real money on marketing, a tight identity quietly makes every dollar work harder.

The logos you remember all hide something worth finding. Start with the idea worth hiding. Subliminal Logos aren't made by accident but designed with the narrative in mind.

Transcript

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So let's start with a logo you've seen probably 10,000 times. Pull up the FedEx logo in your head, but if you've not been told what to look for, you probably notice nothing really unusual about it. But look at the space between the E and the X. The negative space, the white between the letters, forms an arrow pointing to the right. Forward, motion, speed, delivery. Once you see the arrow, you can't unsee it. The arrow becomes the logo. Every time you see FedEx truck driving on the highway, for the rest of the life, the arrow will jump out at you. A designer named Lyndon Leader, working at Later Associates in like the 1990s, he spent more than 200 versions iterating on this letter forms until that arrow emerged. So it wasn't lucky. It was engineered, it was designed with precision. The story was there, but it was done intentional. And that's what I want to talk about today. Most founders think that their logo is just a series of choices of visuals, right? You have the logo, the typeface, the colors, and they miss a larger picture. They miss a strategic question, which is how do you want to be remembered? What's going to make you stand out? And what's the story that's going to be told? So this is episode six, the visual system and the sensory system around it, what makes your company recognized from a thousand feet away. I'm John Luke. Welcome to Position to Win. There are two types of brands: the ones that accept their position in the market and the ones that challenge it. This show is for the challengers and for the founders and CMOs who are responsible for making that happen. So there's a brand identity test and it's called the Smash T. Martin Lindstrom called it the smashable brand in his book Brand Sense. So you take your logo off, you take your name off, you smash the bottle until the label is basically you can't see it. And if there's anything left, can a person still recognize it as you? And so Coca-Cola passed a test. The bottle shape alone gives it away, and obviously the color. Apple passes the test. Cinnabon passes the test, and I will shortly tell you why and how. And most companies fail this test completely. You pull the logo off and you pull the name off, and there's nothing underneath. There's no color they own, there's no sound, there's no feeling, there's just a word mark, and that's doing all the work alone. A logo gets too much credit for an identity. It's really just a name tag. And that's the misconception that's clear at first. Brand identity is not your logo. Your logo is one piece of your brand identity. And it's probably the most referenced piece, but it's not the most used piece. So it gets a little bit too much credit for really the full brand identity in its own. Most of the time, your customer meets your brand, they are not actually looking at your logo. They are looking at the colors of your packaging, they're looking at the shape of the typography, they are listening to the messaging, the scale of your website, and the cadence of the advertising, or the white space, or the photos, the photography style that's inside, and or at the context of which everything is living in. All of those things taken together become part of the identity. Paul Rand, one of the greatest designers of all time, the designer who gave us the IBM logo, the ABC logo, the UPS logo, and the Ford logo, the Ford script logo, said it's best. A logo does not sell, it identifies. It's like a name tag. It is the mark that collects all the associates your brand has earned over time. But the logo alone does not do the selling. It's the whole system applied consistently, recognized in any context that builds brand equity. When Apple launches a new product, you can tell it's Apple from 50 yards away, even when the logo is not in sight. The minimalism, the photography, the general white space, obviously their brand product style, the tight, the modern sans serif, and the gray backgrounds or light off-white backgrounds. All of that is identity. And the logo is the member of the cast, but it's not the star. An identity system is more than a logo, and it is a handful of parts working together. So for Tiffany, one of the most iconic things about their brand is the single-colored blue. And for Coca-Cola, the bottle shape and the script. And for Apple, it tends to be the white space. Everything else in their system supports that one signature and the way the brand supports the main singer in the orchestra. So here's a thing that's often overlooked is an identity system is a decision to be one thing on purpose over and over and over again. And the power comes from that repetition. So you keep the color, the type, and the spacing across a thousand different touch points, and the customer ends up remembering it. It becomes sharper over time and it builds brand equity over time. You vary this too much, it becomes less memorable. A different look on a website and the deck and the packaging, each one of them is fine on its own, but together they cancel each other out. The customer does not end up holding the memory, it just blurs out the memory and they hold to nothing. So consistency is what turns a pile of parts into a picture that they can hold into memory. He's the guy that always wears that black shirt. Anyone can copy your visuals, but no one can copy your consistency. Now, most modern professionals love to talk about subliminal logos, but in the business community, people tend to skip over it. And these subliminal logos have a lot of marketing potential. It gives people something to talk about and it adds additional recognition over time. FedEx is the most famous logo. Once you start there, you'll start seeing them everywhere. We have Amazon, they have an arrow that goes from A to Z, signifying that everything is possible from A to Z. And it also forms a smiley face over time, which people identified as customer experience and what that feels like. Then we have Toblerone, we have that mountain, and then inside that there's the negative space that forms the bear. The bear has to do with the city of Bears, which is in Switzerland, which is where it originated from. It's the founding city. So it has a little bit more deeper history there, and you can always talk about that. And then there's also Basket Robin. If you look at the BR word mark, and you'll see a 31 there. And that talks about the 31 flavors. And then there's the Tour de France. And the Tour has the yellow sun behind it. And if you look at the O and the U and the R, it combines and creates a silhouette of a cyclist that's pedaling. So the cyclist is the brand. And you have the Pittsburgh Zoo. You have the silhouette of it, is the tree in green, and then the negative space forms additional animals, right? We have a gorilla and a lioness, and they're facing each other. The animals are the zoo's residence and hidden inside the tree. Then you have Formula One. We have the F and the one, which creates a negative space that forms into the arrow of speed. The logo itself is kind of like racing. And then there's another brand. We have Cisco. The Cisco mark, but it's actually a stylized representation of the Golden Gate Bridge. Because Cisco was founded in San Francisco, it has a signal strength that like visualizes the bars, and because it sells networking equipment, so it also has two meanings into those stylized lines, right? So that gives a brand deeper talking points and becomes more memorable for the people, especially if they're also in San Francisco. Like, hey, look, there's the Golden Gate Bridge. Okay, so then we have Hershey's Kiss. The kiss is the word mark. You look at the K and the I, there's a silhouette of a hidden kiss in it. And sitting between them is the negative space. Then we have Vio, right? This is Sony's computer line. The logo has a stylized V and an A that's forming an analog kind of wave, which is a parable in itself, that they are the bridge between analog and digital computing. Now I could go on and I could list 30 more. We have Carefor, LG, NBC, The Bronx Zoo, Milwaukee Brewers, the Guide of Food Writers. And once you know what you need to look for, you realize that many of the logos that you've walked past your whole life are carrying a secondary meaning that you've never noticed. So we do this work every day where we try to see what hidden meetings we can bring into the logo or how we can make it more memorable. And so with the American Cancer Society in 2024, the sort of hope was kind of getting lost alongside and the word mark inside the trapezoid shape. So we pulled those things out and lost the additional visual noise to make it simple, scaled it up so that it could stand alone by besides its name. So you'll be able to see the before and the after, and the point was simple. We give the strongest part of the mark enough room to be seen so that it can carry the whole brand. And you can see this in some of our other work as well, as whether you're looking at taste, frequency, lantern light. And this is one of the things that I am most passionate about, as it really gives a brand more potential to be remembered. It is worth asking why a designer would spend 200 iterations to hide an arrow that works fine without it. There's three reasons why logos with subliminal qualities and storytelling potential should not be overlooked. And its first is that the discovery moment travels. It travels further than it would. When they catch the FedEx arrow or the Amazon smile, their brain files that logo deeper than they otherwise would. And they cannot keep it to themselves. They'll end up saying, Hey, did you see the FedEx logo has an arrow behind it? And that's one of the most shared facts about any logo that's ever made. The hidden layer turns into a customer evangelist. And every retelling is free PR and another round of exposure that you really never paid for. And secondly, this shows Signal and Craft, and it shows that it has a story to tell. And that says something. And so, of course, the last thing this reinforces the meaning. The best subliminal details double down on what the brand already stands for. FedEx Arrow reinforces speed and delivery, and the Amazon Smile reinforces customer happiness. Baskin Robbins with the 31 different flavors and varieties, and Formula One with racing. The subliminal layers is not random cleverness, it is the brand's core idea. So let's take this back and zoom back out because I do not want to leave you thinking that identity is only about the logo and the hidden secrets within it. Color is often a most loaded bearing piece of an identity. Color is pre-recognition, you recognize the Tiffany blue and the target red before you recognize really any word mark. In a crowded feed, color is what catches the eye. And good identity has one color that owns the brand, not a palette of eight. Every time you add another shade of color, you're making things more difficult to be remembered. Really, brands that have one or two colors get remembered more than the brands that have three or four. One signature color that the market learns to attach to you and that you defend legally where you can. That ends up giving you a lot of potential. And typography. Typography is the second most load-bearing piece in the visual system. Most companies use forgettable type because they are afraid to commit. But type carries a tone, and a brand set in Havetica feels different than the same brand that's sent in condensed serif. A brand set in Geometric SAN feels different than the one in a more humanistic soft type. So you pick it deliberately, you own it, and do not reach for the safe choice because the distinctive one is scary. And then there's imagery. Imagery is the third, whether you commission photography license it, or you have an illustrative style. Right? Apple's photography style is recognizable. Patagonia's documentary style is its own brand. All of these work together. But apart, they kind of produce confusion. Now, everything I have described so far you take and you see with your eyes. You have logos, colors, type imagery, site. It's all from your site. You have five senses. And most brands fight for attention, use all five if the tools are available. So you start with sound, MasterCard spent two years building a sonic identity, dozens of artists around 2,000 melodies, narrowed down to one, and there is a sound that your card taps or a reader and the melody under every ad. Within the first year, their own commission research, 77% of the customers said that the brand felt more trustworthy because of the sound. At checkout, the sound that it made added more signaling of trust and acceptance every time it played. So think about what that is. A brand that you can recognize with your eyes closed. Now listen to this. Yup. That's the Intel 4 No Bong. Now listen to this. Listen to this. Can you guess it? That's the HBO static before it was the show. It's still famous till today. You know all three of them, and you don't even need the logo. Now let's think about smell. Smell skips the analytical steps, right? It goes straight to the heart. It's something that you feel, it's something that you remember, and it brings back past memories. And that's why smell can drop you back from a moment that happened 20 years ago before you can even really name it. Cinnabon is a brand that really understood this. Matter of fact, they understood this so well that they put their oven right there in front of everyone. And so when they pull out the new freshly made Cinnabons, they make sure that the scent goes everywhere. So much so that even if their stack is so full, the workers are told to put cinnamon and sugar back into the oven so that smell is back into the air. And you can find cinnamon packed everywhere, and you will always smell it from a distance and you know the identity before you even see their logo or the words or the colors. Abercame did something similar. They had cologne pumped through the vents. And the research at Washington State showed that people spent 20% more when there was a simple positive scent in the air. And then there was a feeling, the physical kind, the emotional kind, the weight of a card in your hand, the resistance of a dial on your fingertips, the exact tension on your laptop when you open it. All of these things have been designed, and none of them by accident, and it really is what brings a full identity to life. The identity you feel through your fingers before you have a real word. A brand that you can only see is the easiest kind to forget. One more layer that is outside of what people usually think of when they think about the five senses is delight. And Daniel famously cited this as the peak end rule. And they remember the end. And the rest basically fades out. Now, hear that as a brand builder. Your customer is not scoring every single touch point, they are keeping the peak and the ending. So you get to choose where to spend your energy. Disney has you waiting in line for hours. And then at the end, what you remember is the fireworks. So the wait was for most of the hours, it was most of the time of you being there. But the fireworks ends up being the memory. And that is the rule to doing this work. The smallest version of this cost almost nothing. Tiffany Bucks, you can bring yourself to throw it away, but the handwritten note inside the bag, the way the good app celebrates the thing you finish instead of going quiet, they are not decorations. They are the peaks that people end up keeping. Design the peak, design the ending, and let the middle be ordinary, because it has to be. Some of the most rigorous research and marketing behind the book, how brands grow, argue that brands grow less by being different and more by being easy to recognize and easy to recall, easy to remember. Byron Sharp put it into four words. Branding lasts, differentiation doesn't. And I've spent five episodes on differentiating, so let me draw one clean line to keep it moving. Positioning is the argument of why you are the right choice, and it lives in your words. Identity is how fast someone can recognize in the first place. So you do need both. So one estimate that JKR put is that global marketing spend is nearly $4.7 trillion a year. And about 85% of all that marketing spend is actually not distinctive, meaning only about 15% is actually truly ownable to that brand. So most brands are not losing because their idea is wrong. They are losing because nothing about them is recognizable enough for people to remember. They blend in, they sound like everybody else, and then they pay to introduce themselves over and over and over again as if nothing is remembered. And the market does not forget the bad brands. It really forgets the forgettable ones, the ones that are of nothing distinctive and nothing ownable about them. A good identity isn't just a document, it's a train capabilities across an organization. Every designer, every marketer, every product team remembers and internalizes the rules. They produce on-brand work without really asking because they know it so well. They know when to bend the rules and when to hold a line. The documentary, the brand book, the style guides, the panel libraries, a reference, but it's not the work. The work is hundreds of tiny decisions made every day across a company. Does this email use the right font? Does this slide follow the same spacing rule? Does this photo fit our photography style? Does this ad carry the right amount of white space? When identity works and skills, it stacks and it grows over time and it's easier to remember. Every impref reinforces the last. The brands gain recognition faster than a single campaign could deliver. A loose identity that has a lot of variants tends to do the opposite. Every piece of the company ships and makes things a little bit fuzzier, a little bit harder to remember. And so being consistent is key. I've worked on award-winning logos, and the ones that broke out were not the brands with the most traction at the start that just had the most beautiful logo. They were the ones that built the most ownable assets across every touch point: the website, the deck, the packaging, the hold music, the receipts, and with systems clear enough to scale. An identity that holds across a hundred touch points. That is the strategy. Most companies are already spending money to be remembered. Their identity is just too weak to hold the memory. So you are gonna pay for it either way, whether you invested in it or not, and whether it's strong, every dollar of your marketing has to fight harder and harder. So every brand pays to be remembered. And when you stand out, you earn a higher recall. You are easily remembered. And when it's weak, you end up spending more money and it's like a leaky bucket. You don't know where it's coming from, but you're just fighting hard to gain traction. With a strong brand identity, it's like you stand out, you earn higher recall, means that people remember you more for the same amount of spend. Think of it as a permanent added value. You flip the coin and it's continuous advertising discount. The recall you've already earned acts like the ad spend that you've never really paid for. It's just a continuous discount. A Nikonic brand never pays for full price for attention again. That's really the power of brand identity when it's strong. So here's your takeaway. Identity is not a logo, it's everything a person can recognize you by. Right? We have the color, shape, sound, sense, the peak they remember, and the ending that you gave them. So run the smash test, take your name off your own brand, look at what is left. The color you own, a sound, a feeling, a smell. If the answer is nothing, you do not really have a strong identity yet. It might be leaking you market expend. You just have a name tag. So in next episodes, we're gonna talk from brand identity to brand voice. How do you stand out? How do you become remembered? And what that looks like, and how you're gonna withstand different campaigns and through different kinds of content, churn, etc. etc. So we'll walk you through the process of that. So thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon.