The Mario Blog

As designers and publishers, we are always looking to make sure our brand, or those that we do consulting work for, always appear clear, distinctive and represent what a company stands for.

With logos, media company executives make an effort to present their firm in a good light, to create perceptions of credibility and authority, and, at a visual level, to make the logo distinctive and memorable.

Now custom online research for Ad Age, Morning Consult asked 1,296 brand experts and 2,201 consumers who don’t work in marketing what they think of the best-known logos today.

I am not surprised that these appear to be the most popular logos: Coca-Cola, Apple, Nike, Target and McDonald’s. I am also not surprised that, while marketing types do not necessarily think much of it, the baby food brand, Gerber, is a favorite with people in the survey.

I look at that Gerber logo and, while I realize that it is somewhat dated, I agree that people like it. In my case, it brings back memories of when my four children were babies and feeding them, and holding those little baby food containers with one hand, feeding the child with the other, and keeping a wet towel handy to wipe the baby’s mouth.  Sometimes, perhaps, how we relate to a product creates some sort of connection with the brand and its visual representation. I cannot imagine Gerber ever changing this logo to modernize it.

Which brings to mind, a couple of times during my career when we simply wanted to update a columnist’s sig, and readers reacted negatively, preferring the old.

It’s called attachment to the product and, therefore, the brand.

The Ad Age study

Here is a quick look at what the marketers (left) and the people considered to be their favorite brand logos:

According to the Ad Age study:

Coca-Cola, Apple, Target and McDonald’s logos all ranked very high among both brand professionals and consumers, for example. But consumers love the Gerber baby, not a top 10 pick among branding pros. And marketers like the Twitter bird a lot more than the general population—”childish,” one consumer calls it.

The least favored brand logos

My take

Notice that the preferred logos are simplistic to the max, make a strong statement visually and also represent the product well.  I notice that not a single “type only” logo made it to the top, yet I like such logos as the Helvetica-fest one of German Airlines Lufthansa.

Read about the Lufthansa logo creation here.

Here are a few of my favorites, and, it is no surprise that most of them are “type only” brand logos.

April 18-19, 2018-–Newscamp ,Augsburg,  Germany.

June 3-6, 2018—The Seminar, San Antonio, Texas.