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Wal-mart changed their logo and all the braggadocio that is going on about the simple logo change just cracks me up.
I know a lot of Trend Hunter readers work in the world of marketing/branding. That just means they are in on the joke; they get paid to agonize over typefaces and colors.
The new logo has nice round letters and the hyphen/star between Wal and Mart has been replaced with an asterisk. Whoops, the marketing people are calling that little symbol a sunburst or flower. WTF? It’s an asterisk. As in Walmart* *where boomers go die, or Walmart* *bring your teeth, it’s free sample day.
Read what various people who get paid giant sums of money to babble have to say below…
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The new sunburst "looks organic. My sense is they are trying to say, 'we're an eco-aware company,'" says Marty Neumeier, president of Neutron, a branding firm in San Francisco. "They seem to be going for something friendlier," says Tobias Frere-Jones, a professor of typography at Yale University and a principal at Hoefler & Frere-Jones, a type-design firm in New York. But Wal-Mart hasn't gone too far, keeping the brand name a proper noun and beginning with a capital letter—think Google's all-text logo with a big "G," vs. Facebook's with a small "f." "Otherwise, it might look like they're trying too hard to play with the cool kids," says Frere-Jones. "Companies understand the equity and value in using their logo as a tool or strategic weapon against competitors to differentiate their services and convey their unique offerings," says Michael Gericke, a New York partner in the international design firm Pentagram.
(businessweek)
References: businessweek
Filed In:
branding,
business,
market,
marketing,
retail
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