Abstract
Logos have long been transporting the brand promise, which is confirmed by the carefully defined experiences the audiences have with brands. However, the new paradigms of interaction brought by social media, machine learning and big data have been shifting the power to the audiences, who are increasingly demanding less massified content and more hyper-personalised experiences. Brands have been adapting with flexible approaches, some of them made visible through their dynamic visual identities in which the logos transmogrify in some of their components, rather than being consistently static. In this research, the possibility of dynamic logos becoming smart logos — through which the brands’ audiences/users can define their experiences by visualising personally meaningful brand-related data — is explored. Five creative workshops with users from three university campuses based in the United Kingdom were organised. The created outputs were analysed, and they evidence what is both considered meaningful content and the most natural logo variation mechanisms for data to be displayed and consumed. Finally, a heuristic to support the design of smart logos is proposed and the conceptual model that underpins it and that allows answering the research question is presented.
Highlights
Brands are an important intangible asset for most entities strongly relying on communication, namely due to the deep, meaningful relationships audiences can develop with a brand (Thomson, MacInnis & Park, 2005; Schau, Muñiz & Arnould, 2009)
These kinds of visual identities are recognisable for potentially allowing a new logo to be used/ displayed each day, making brands behave like living organisms (Kreutz, 2005; Felsing, 2010; Van Nes, 2012; Neumeier, 2016; Lelis & Kreutz, 2019) and are characterised by flexibility, variability, and multiplicity of forms, usually relying on a formal genetic code used as a system of basic rules to manage the forms themselves (Guida, 2014)
After a non-probability convenience sampling method, so that participants with creative backgrounds could be selected, three workshops were delivered at the University of West London (UWL) in London, involving students of undergraduate and postgraduate (UG/PG) courses: Advertising & PR, Graphic Design & Illustration, Games Design, and Advertising, Branding & Communication
Summary
Brands are an important intangible asset for most entities strongly relying on communication, namely due to the deep, meaningful relationships audiences can develop with a brand (Thomson, MacInnis & Park, 2005; Schau, Muñiz & Arnould, 2009). More than 20 years ago, Pine II and Gilmore (1998: 98) described experience as a distinct kind of economic contribution, one that would be “as real an offering as any service, good or commodity”, in this way detaching the branded experience from the branded products or services. (Kazmierczak, 2003; Karjalainen, 2004; Zomerdijk & Voss, 2010; Johnston & Kong, 2011; Nysveen, Pedersen & Skard, 2013) This leads to the acceptance that branded experiences can be determined from a bottom-up perspective, possibly grounded on the information brands provide to their audiences and that audiences can access these days (Lelis, 2021), since the unprecedented access to information have made them more receptive to change and more demanding
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