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 Marketing professor Mike Walsh gets national attention for his expertise in logos and branding. |
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Marketing prof knows logos
Michael Walsh is getting his 15 minutes of fame — because he knows logos.
His research on logos was recently mentioned in Time Magazine, and prior to that in Advertising Age, Fastcompany, the Houston Business Journal, Science Daily, ScienceBlog, Korea Business Central, Japan Retail News, 60 Second Marketer, Consumer Affairs, on the Wharton School of Business website and at Futurity.org. He has been included in articles in Biz Journals.com, Businessweek, the Christian Science Monitor, Denver Business Journal, Houston Business Journal, Houston Chronicle, KUHF-FM, Macleans.ca, Portland Business Journal, San Jose Business Journal, and U.S. News & World Report.
Most recently his research and expertise have been cited in media coverage regarding Starbucks’ recently announced logo change. In the Starbucks case, designers removed the Starbucks name from the logo, leaving the familiar mermaid symbol in a circle.
That kind of change shouldn’t affect customer loyalty, Walsh contends in a paper to be published this fall in the Journal of Consumer Marketing, with coauthors, Vikas Mittal of Rice University and Karen Winterich of Penn State University.
They found that if a company changes angular logos to rounded ones, the logos would be more appealing in countries such as India and China, where the cultures are often more interdependent and collectivist. Starbucks hopes soon to triple the number of its stores in China and to expand into supermarkets. See Starbucks logo evolution.
His interest in logos began when he was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and considering dissertation topics. At about the same time, in 2003, Apple introduced a new operating system, and as part of that, introduced a revised logo featuring a brushed silver apple instead of the monochromatic apple, which was more popular than the executives at Apple imagined.
The operating system seemed fine, but the new brushed silver apple was panned. In fact, Walsh said, within a day hundreds of loyal Apple customers had signed an online petition against the new design.
Then there was the Tropicana Orange Juice fiasco in 2008 that involved a new carton design and logo to replace the familiar orange with a straw stuck in it. The consumer outcry was so profound the company (PepsiCo owns Tropicana) had to reverse the change. See Tropicanna’s design changes. Same thing happened to Gap late last year.
Why, wondered Walsh? After all, the new brushed silver apple seemed a relatively minor change, and certainly the executives who approved it wouldn’t do something intentional to damage their brand. What, he wondered, would cause such backlash?
He and his colleagues devised an experiment using familiar athletic shoe brand logos. They had an actual designer create new logos and administered surveys to consumers. What they discovered was that to the extent that consumers identified with brands and found some deep personal individuality associated with their favorite brands, any change to this brand caused a negative backlash. The greater the brand commitment, the stronger the consumer preference for a current logo design as opposed to a revised design.
Tropicana’s new design wasn’t all that bad, either. In a 2009 interview with New York Times reporter Stuart Elliott, (which begins: “It took 24 years, but PepsiCo now has its own version of New Coke”), then President Neil Campbell said it was not the amount of complaints about the new design that caused a corporate about face. They came, he said, from only a “fraction of a percent of the people who buy the product.”
However, he added, the backlash arose from some of “our most loyal consumers.”
“We underestimated the deep emotional bond,” he said. “Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded.”
This, said Walsh, is the good news and bad news about brand management. “Highly committed customers become very loyal, but, because of this, it becomes a little tricky to change things.”
Additionally, the Internet has given consumers more of a voice, Walsh said. “The Internet has had a profound effect on marketing communications by giving consumers an ability to easily communicate around the globe.”
Walsh teaches undergraduate integrated promotions and services marketing and marketing strategy to graduate students. He said it wasn't really that long ago when consumers had limited abilities to communicate. “Today, thanks to blogs, message boards, email and social networking tools, consumers can have significant impact in the marketplace.”
Thus, marketers have become much more sensitive and responsive to consumer opinion. When Gap redesigned its logo, there was immediate and nearly unanimous consumer rejection fed by the online world.
“Within days, Gap responded to the outcry and reinstated its old logo,” Walsh said. “I can't image something like this occurring in the pre-Internet days.”
By the way, his favorite logo is Nike’s. “The logo is a classic case of a company gradually simplifying its corporate identity,” he said. “The logo first appeared in 1971, when the word ‘Nike,’ the Greek goddess of victory, was printed in orange over the outline of a checkmark, the sign of a positive mark. Used as a motif on sports shoes since the 1970s, this checkmark is now so recognizable that the company name itself has become superfluous.”
