Anyone in advertising can tell you how important a logo is. It’s the face people see when they think about your brand. You want people to find that face attractive and hope that it says something about the kind of person you are. Interestingly enough, just like life, when brands become older, that face starts to seem less attractive and changes what people think of you. So big brands, much like wealthy Park Avenue housewives, sometimes decide they need a facelift.
J.C. Penney debuted the above logo earlier this week and for those who are blanking on the old one right now…
The first thing I’m going to say about this is, what exactly is “jcp enney”? While they are clearly capitalizing on the shorter, more modern “jcp” branding that has become colloquial in their advertising in recent years, it comes at a pretty hefty price to the read ability of the full name.
“Enney” seems like a subdivision of the JC Penney brand. Like Ann Taylor and Ann Taylor Loft, to compare apples to apples. What’s the smarter way to marry the initials with the remaining letters? Maybe its a different point size or an entirely different solution all together.
Rebranding is a bullseye that many companies have trouble hitting. Reaching too far runs the risk of losing the base you already have, while reaching too timidly fails to resonate with new audiences.
An interesting bit of repositioning is going on at Chrysler without the aid of a logo change. Detroit rapper Eminem, loaned some star power and maybe even street cred, to a company that was on the ropes following the auto industry collapse.
What’s smart about this repositioning is that Chrysler isn’t just fabricating some image in they’re marketing department, they’re pulling from the true and gritty roots in the company’s history. The campaign, which continued to run without Eminem after the Superbowl, is a beautiful manifesto about a brand that comes from the Motor City and does this one thing better than anywhere else.
Are they the only auto manufacturer out of Detroit? Of course not, they are the first ones using that backstory to come off the Automotive bail-outs with a strategy and image that can compete with younger adult targeted brands like Kia.
Last fall the Gap briefly introduced this logo to disastrous reviews.
For those who shop at the Gap a lot, that logo was not a surprise. They had been inching toward this typeface for a few seasons in their marketing and displays. While the gradient blue box does feel like a half-hearted attempt to tie-in the original logo, the thinking typographically is theoretically dead on. Bold sans-serifs are more modern than tall thin serifs, knockout white lettering doesn’t feel as effortless and casual as the Gap asserts itself to be. Despite this, it was so thoroughly rejected by critics and consumers that the Gap ended up abandoning it that same season.
This may have been a situation where the logo we know is so iconic nothing would ever seem good enough to replace it. Hand in hand with a new logo that isn’t exactly amazing, what was expected to be a sure thing ended in disaster.
When Sci-Fi made the switch over to Syfy in early 2009 I expected it to be a short-lived mistake. The cable network reached so far in its rebranding that they even changed the spelling of their name.
Like the situation with Gap, I expected Sci-Fi fans, who are notorious for being hyper-critical of remakes and obsessive over details to raise hell on the internet message boards.
I was expecting the change to be too radical. The old logo had a retro sci-fi nostalgia I felt diehards identified with. The new logo is slick and kind of quirky; paired with some impressive motion graphics work I think audiences were wowed into submission. Two years later the new logo is still going strong, go figure.
There is no sure things in forecasting how a new logo will be received by your audience. Playing it safe sometimes pays off just as badly as over-reaching. Sometimes breaking all the rules get all the right results. Personally, I think there’s a whole lot more to revitalizing a brand than some new vector art and a trendy typeface; to squeeze one more example out of the face metaphor, its whats inside the brand that people really care about.
