Logo Motion

It’s been a couple of months since the storm hit Britain – the very British tempest in a teacup over London’s new logo for the 2012 Olympics. Obviously, this was always going to be a game of high-stakes poker in the branding sense. After all, London is the capital city of the world (as far as we English are concerned).

And we won the Olympic bid by beating France. Nothing gives Brits more chest-thumping pride than beating the French at anything.

This was the beginning of the next wave of Cool Brittania, a symbolic rising of the Statue of Victory from the ashes of our endless sporting defeats, a reason to believe again, to dream. (Okay, sorry. I got a little carried away there.)

No more ink needs to be wasted on whether the logo is any good or not – and, after all, a logo is just one of the ways a brand manifests itself in the marketplace. The really interesting part of this affair for me was the public reaction to this one element and how that reaction anticipated the success of the event’s marketing.

For many folks in the design business, the logo offended primarily because it disappointed. But the British public’s vitriol came from a wholly different place – the heart. And that reinforced something I learned when I first got into this branding game: It’s an emotional game.

Reactions to brands are visceral, primal and instinctual. Some insist branding is an ill-defined business, without tangible deliverables and all based in designer mumbo-jumbo and “marketing- speak.” But, in reality, people’s reactions to brands are very tangible: horror when something offends, a sense of comfort and loyalty when something reinforces what they believe. This is not merely the emperor’s new clothes here. This is the real stuff of feeling and of emotion.

Defenders of the logo argued that the truly new always takes some time to get used to. Over time, we come to see things as iconic and learn to love them. Didn’t the art world first balk at Picasso before later acknowledging his genius?

All true. But today’s consumer isn’t standing in a musty Victorian-era gallery gobsmacked over “The Blue Nude.” Today’s general public is wholly brand-aware. When we respond well to a brand, we follow with our wallets. Great design has always been this way and always should be. If it doesn’t move me, I shouldn’t need an explanation on why it should.

Our end-users don’t just vote in the subjective world of a gallery, lobbing opinions on whether a painting or sculpture caused their heartstrings to be plucked or their muse to be stirred. No. In retail, people’s reactions to brands are perhaps the most acute of all. They buy it. Or they don’t.

The best retail brands aren’t particularly cerebral. Shoppers don’t have the time for intellectual reflection. Sales are quickly measured and brands are constantly course-correcting. All brands are living things, I suppose, but retail-focused brands must shed their skin more frequently than most to stay apace with that most fickle of targets, consumers. The fact that there is no subjectivity to retail sales is a constant reminder to stay on your game and remain limber.

Sure, there are variables. The best brand in the world is nothing without the merchandise, the store, the service to back it up. But if you deliver on those variables, there are no more excuses. Retail brands have no time to mature at a leisurely pace, no time to grow to be loved, to find a place in our hearts. They either work or they don’t.

And when they don’t? The public reaction forced the designers of the London logo to play their remaining cards a little earlier than intended. We soon saw a revised, softer and more fluid side of the brand expression come to life. In the new iterations, the boxy shape that had offended so much became a frame, its lurid Day-Glo colors replaced by images of inspiration offered up by the public or the corporate palettes of the event’s sponsors.

Was it perfect? Far from it. But it finally felt like a living thing.