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When a new logo is released, it does not have an established meaning in the mind of the viewer. As logos have become more highly scrutinized by consumers and critics, it has become more important to understand viewers’ initial responses to logos. While other studies have researched the impact of aesthetic choices on viewer reaction to logos, this study aims to understand the effect of the surrounding visual identity system when a new logo is introduced.

This study combines a content analysis of 335 posts on the logo review website Brand New with the voting data from their polls to understand how visual context correlates with a viewer’s initial response.

Increased amounts of visual context correlate to an improved response from viewers. Different types of context that can be presented – from logo variations and environmental examples to videos and animation – have varied effects.

When releasing a new logo, companies and organizations may receive a better response from viewers if they provide more visual context. Animations may also provide an improved response.

This study takes a novel approach to exploring viewer responses to logos by combining content analysis with voting data. While most studies use fictitious or abstract logo designs, this study uses actual logos and context to better understand viewer responses.

Focusing on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are characterized by resource restrictions, this paper aims to explore consumer segment profiles by considering demographic, personality and creativity traits to determine whether consumers with different profiles exhibit distinct affective reactions to different logo design types (organic, cultural and abstract).

This exploratory study incorporates recent methodological developments, such as the novel response style correction method, to account for response style effects in evaluations of affect toward logo design. In separate analyses, respondents are segmented according to response style–corrected logo affect and personality and creativity items. The segmentation analysis relies on reduced k-means, a joint dimension and cluster analysis method, which accounts for dependencies between items while maximizing between-cluster variability. A total of 866 respondents from the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal: n = 543; Spain: n = 323) participated.

Based on a study using unknown logos (proxy for lower levels of budget communication, characteristics of SMEs), results reveal that there are three segments of consumers based on their affective response toward logo design: logo design insensitives, cultural logo dislikers and organic logo lovers. These segments are associated with different personality traits, creativity and biological sex (although biological sex is not a discriminant variable).

The decision not to control logos by color, to increase external validity, could limit the study’s internal validity if this aspect interacts with relevant study variables. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence can be used to further test associations between consumer profiles and responses to logo design.

Findings highlight the relevance of considering complex profile segments, combining demographics, psychographics and creativity to predict affective consumer responses to brand logo design. This research provides guidelines for SMEs when choosing or modifying their logo design to appeal to different consumer segments.

This study provides managers of SMEs (less present nowadays in empirical studies) with evidence suggesting that complex customer profiles help to understand differences in affective responses to natural logo designs. Furthermore, it relies on the use of a novel methodological development that improves the accuracy of the exploratory study developed.

With trade amounting to more than US$400bn, counterfeiting is already affecting many successful brands. Often, consumers are deceived into buying fake products due to the visual similarity between fake and original brand logos. This paper aims to explore the varying forms of fraudulent imitation of original brand logotypes (operationalized at the level of logotype transposition), which can aid in the detection of a counterfeit brand.

Across two studies, this research tested how well consumers can differentiate counterfeit from original logos of well-known brands both explicitly and implicitly. Seven popular brand logos were altered to create different levels of visual dissimilarity and participants were required to discriminate the logos as fake or genuine.

Results demonstrate that although consumers can explicitly discriminate fake logos with a high degree of accuracy, the same is not true under conditions in which logos are presented very briefly (tapping participants’ implicit or automatic logo recognition capabilities), except when the first and last letters of the logotype are substituted.

A large body of research on counterfeit trade focuses on the individual or cross-cultural differences behind the prevalence of counterfeit trade. There is limited research exploring the ability of a consumer to correctly identify a fake logo, based on its varying similarity with the original logotype; this paper addresses this gap. Given that many of the purchase decisions are often made automatically, identifying key implicit differentiators that can help a consumer recognize a fake logo should be informative to both practitioners and academics.

The purpose of this research is to understand how brand-building is used to lend credibility to investor information and to differentiate countries competing for foreign investment. Brand signals, such as slogans and logos, are frequently used by governments and their investment promotion agencies to enhance the presentation of information to potential investors interested in acquiring or establishing a business within their country. Yet, little is known about how governments use brand building to foster professionalism and convey their expertise in international expansion assistance and differentiate themselves from one another in an investment promotion context.

This research content analyzes the slogans and logos found in 55 months of print advertising and on the websites of 181 countries engaged in investment-seeking activities.

The research finds that slogans and logos are frequently used across both samples, but slogan use is greater in print advertising than on the Web, which is likely because of the greater effort required to develop an advertising campaign than to maintain a website. Regardless of medium, logo use is greater than slogan use. In the sample, slogans tended to be generic or undifferentiated and do not appear to facilitate brand credibility. However, logos were better designed than slogans and incorporated more territorial and cultural symbols and elements of expertise.

This study provides for a deeper understanding of investment promotion, especially, as it relates to brand building both on the Web and in print advertising. It also extends the author’s understanding of brand building within a specialized area of business-to-business organizational buying. From a managerial perspective, the research highlights the need for differentiated slogans and for logos using territorial and cultural symbols to better assist governments with appearing more professional, conveying expertise and differentiating their country from potential rivals.

This study looks at the visibility of logos during the televised broadcast of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin, and television viewers' perceptions, recall and recognition of those logos. The results indicate that the number of brands and logos perceived was far greater than actually existed, bringing into question the effectiveness of the Olympics' 'clean venue' policy.

The study extends the research on visual imagery in advertising to sports marketing. The results suggest that excessive on-shirt advertising is wasteful for sponsorships and harmful for team image. However, a strategy of moderate advertising increases the brand recall rate and does not harm the team's image. From a managerial perspective, this study highlights the risks of excessive use of sponsor logos and provides a framework for determining the optimal level of on-shirt advertising for professional teams.

The purpose of this paper is to test the brand elongation effect which is defined as the impacts of the aspect ratio of logo on consumers’ temporal property assessment and brand evaluation.

This paper provides a theory with experiments.

The brand elongation effect that strip-shaped logos can make consumers perceive temporal property longer than square-shaped logos has been testified with three pairs fictional logos and one pair real-life one. The valence of temporal property moderates the effect on evaluation of temporal property. The perceived temporal length mediated the shape effect on brand evaluation only when the temporal property is important (vs unimportant) for the product.

This study only deals with the elongation effect of logos’ aspect ratio, without discussing the impact of color, angle/roundness or other graphic properties of logos on consumer attitudes.

This study not only provides empirical supports to update brand logos but also further illustrates that some subtle properties of logos can result in influences that are both significant and substantial.

This research enriches the literature of branding and metaphorical cognition. The findings of this study provide direct implications for brand managers to design logos and manage multi-shape brand logos.

This research aims to examine the role of perceived threat (i.e. COVID-19) on people’s preferences for destination logo designs. In addition, it investigates the influence of childhood socioeconomic status (SES) and sensation seeking on the aforementioned effect.

Five experiments are used. Studies 1 A and 1B examine the impact of the threat of COVID-19 on visiting intentions as influenced by different destination logos. Study 2 replicates the previous studies and tests for evidence of mediation by the perceived risk. Studies 3 and 4 investigate the moderating role of childhood SES and sensation seeking.

The results show that a salient threat of COVID-19 leads people to display higher visiting intentions when presented with simpler (vs complex) destination logo designs. The perceived risk mediates this effect as well. This preference is evident only for people with low (vs high) childhood SES and only for relatively low sensation seekers.

This study contributes to the branding literature by investigating how situational factors can influence affective reactions to brand logos and to the tourism literature by further investigating the impact of logos on visiting intentions.

This study provides actionable insights for tourism marketers and logo designers, allowing them to select or create positively perceived destination logos during a potential global crisis.

This research offers the first evidence that pandemic-related threat perceptions influence people’s visiting intentions when presented with different destination logos, and that these effects are influenced by individual characteristics such as childhood SES or sensation seeking. In doing so, the current study offers a more sophisticated understanding of the potential boundary conditions driving people’s brand logo evaluation.

This paper aims to investigate the commonalities and asymmetries between consumer responses to different types of natural designs across countries.

Data were gathered through a survey in three European countries ranking differently in what concerns Hofstede’s (1981) uncertainty avoidance dimension (UAD). Respondents can vary strongly in the way they interpret and use rating scales, exhibiting a variety of response styles. In the analysis of consumers’ preferences for logo design, this article apply constrained dual scaling (CDS) to account for response styles in categorical data.

Results demonstrate the broad appeal of natural logo designs, suggesting that design preferences are similar within countries with different cultural orientations. However, findings indicate that cultural dimensions influence how consumers respond to different types of natural logo designs. Indeed, the positive effects of organic designs are even more salient in countries with higher UAD. Thus, when managers prepare to launch their brands in countries that exhibit more discomfort with uncertainty, they should consider incorporating organic visual identity elements into their logos to achieve the maximum positive affect.

Companies invest extensive time, research and money in generating, promoting and modifying their logos. This paper provides important implications for international brand managers aiming to build a consistent and favorable brand image. From a methodological perspective, the results come from the analysis of clean data – that is, data after applying CDS, which increases the validity of the cross-country comparison.

The purpose of this study is to determine how sonic logo’s acoustic features (intensity, pitch and pace) based on melodic tunes with no voice orient the response of consumers, attract attention, elicit levels of pleasantness and calmness and transmit brand personality traits.

A within-subject experimental factorial design is applied to measure emotional arousal (indexed as electrodermal activity) and enhancement on perceptual processing (indexed as heart rate), as well as self-reported factors, namely, calmness/excitement, pleasantness and brand personality scales.

Results show a significant increase on electrodermal activity associated with fast-paced sonic logos and a decrease in heart rate in slow-paced long sonic logos. Also, fade-up, pitch-ascending fast sonic logos are defined as more exciting and descending-pitch sonic logos as more pleasant.

The use of sonic logos with no voice does limit its implications. Besides, the use of three variables simultaneously with 18 versions of sonic logos in a laboratory setting may have driven participants to fatigue; hence, findings should be cautiously applied.

First, sonic logos are best processed in a fade-up form. Second, fast pace is recommended to orient response, whereas slow pace is recommended to transmit calmness. Practitioners may opt for fast-paced sonic logos if the design is new or played in a noisy environment and opt for slow-paced sonic logos in already highly recognized sound designs.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to combine psychophysiological measures and self-reported scales in a laboratory experiment on how sonic logo’s acoustic features orient response, transmit emotions and personality traits.