In February, however, after four years, Burberry’s then-newly appointed chief creative officer Daniel Lee chose to reintroduce the Knight emblem alongside the more recent identity. In the company’s end-of-year report, chief executive Jonathan Akeroyd explained that the move was to bring more clarity to the brand as it refocused on its British luxury credentials.
The route to normalization
“Normalization is a process of chipping away at the idiosyncrasies, of averaging out. Simplification, done well, is about chipping away at the forgettable, non-essential stuff, until you’re left with the most distinction from the fewest marks,” explained Tim Owen, head of strategy at Turner Duckworth. “There are lots of good reasons to do that, mostly media reasons—those simple but distinct marks being easier to reproduce, easier and quicker to see.”
Among design traditionalists, however, it has not been a popular trend. They’ve grown concerned that all logos will start to look the same; meanwhile, it does seem to work for safety-minded marketers.
“Do we ever find the simple swoosh or half-eaten apple bland or boring?” countered Eric Chia, executive creative director of design at Digitas. “Sometimes this new form might look bland to us visually, but it opens up ways that a brand can express itself.”
Not looking to introduce any change to its brand marque is Lego, which has had its current iteration in place since 1998. It’s a revision of the logotype introduced in 1973, although it has faced many iterations going back to its launch in 1934.
“I’m a big fan of consistency,” Nic Taylor, svp and head of Our Lego Agency, told Adweek. “Therefore, changing logos—especially famous ones that people really recognize—I wouldn’t. It has to be an extreme case to want to do that, and we’ve got one of the best, most recognizable logos in the world. So, I feel like we love it and use it as we should.”
The counter-movement
The pushback against simplification has already begun.
In 2019, the Harvard Business Review ran a study to discover the attributes of a successful logo. The researchers analyzed 423 business-to-consumer brands while also acquiring each brand’s financial information (net sales, advertising, research and development spending, and total assets).
The logos were then categorized as descriptive (Burger King) and nondescriptive (McDonald’s), as well as other design characteristics such as symmetry, shape and color. These, alongside the financial results, acted as control variables and found a descriptive logo had a greater positive effect on sales than a nondescriptive one.
