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When Sponsorship Research International polled 7,000 consumers in 1995 to see how well they recognized brand logos, it found that the McDonald’s logo trounced the Christian cross: 88% of consumers identified the golden arches, compared to 54% who could identify the religious symbol.
In today’s attention economy, the potency of logos is crucial, especially for brands that aren’t as ubiquitous as McDonald’s.
Research firm Frac.tl set out to find the most and least memorable logos for health and wellness brands, revealing how some logos dominate consumer recall while others struggle. The research was commissioned by healthcare practice management platform Tebra.
“Building positive consumer perceptions and trust is especially important in healthcare—but you can’t do any of that if nobody remembers your brand,” Frac.tl senior data journalist Rachel Kirsch told ADWEEK.
Kirsch’s team sat 100 people down in front of sheets of blank paper, then asked them to sketch the logos for selected brands strictly from memory.
Here are four major findings on what divides memorable logos from forgettable ones.
Pick a color and stick with it
The most obvious difference between the most and least recognized brand logos was the presence (or absence) of distinctive colors. Consumers recalled Allegra’s purple logo and Pepto Bismol’s legendary pink far more readily than they did the black-on-white logos of, say, Proactiv and Duane Reade.
But Frac.tl’s study showed that less bombastic colors are also memorable, so long as the brand has used them clearly and consistently. Case in point: Crest toothpaste. As the chart here shows, while consumers might not recall the typeface or whether the letters are upper or lower case, the logo with the blue lettering and red “C” was top of mind.
Own a unique visual element
