How the Brain Reads Logos: what science says about brand marksHow the Brain Reads Logos: what science says about brand marks

In 1971, Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student at Portland State University, drew a few marks for a young entrepreneur her professor had introduced to her and was paid $35 in total, at two dollars an hour. The entrepreneur's name was Phil Knight; his first sentence about the mark he chose is on record: "I don't love it, but maybe it will grow on me." Fifty years later, the Swoosh is one of a handful of marks recognized without a name beside it. Knight's sentence is more scientific than it sounds: liking a mark is largely a matter of having seen it, and psychology has been measuring this since 1968.

In a series of experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, Robert Zajonc showed participants nonsense words and Chinese characters, some once, some twenty-five times. He then asked them to guess whether each one had "a positive or a negative meaning." Participants rated the symbols they had seen more often as more positive, even though the symbols had no meaning at all. Zajonc named this the mere exposure effect, and the effect has been replicated in hundreds of experiments since.

Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman explained the mechanism in 2004: the brain finds beautiful whatever it processes easily. This principle, called "processing fluency," says that simplicity is not a matter of taste but a matter of cost. A complex mark asks more work of the brain at every encounter; a simple mark gets "seen" more on the same advertising budget. A brand's most expensive asset is not the design fee it paid for its mark but the sum of the years it has spent getting that mark seen; changing the mark resets that accumulation to zero.

In 1929, in an experiment on Tenerife, Wolfgang Köhler showed people two abstract shapes, one rounded and one spiky, and asked which was "maluma" and which was "takete." The answers were almost unanimous: the rounded one was maluma. In 2001, Ramachandran and Hubbard repeated the experiment with the words "bouba" and "kiki"; 95 percent of participants called the spiky shape kiki, and the result held among Tamil speakers in India. The brain was building a bridge between shape and sound that did not depend on language.

Neuroscience also found where the bridge is. In 2006, in Psychological Science, Moshe Bar and Maital Neta showed that people prefer the rounded version of an object to its sharp-cornered version; in 2007, using fMRI, they added that sharp-cornered objects more strongly activate the amygdala, the center of threat perception. Marketing science carried this over to the logo: in a study Jiang, Gorn, Galli, and Chattopadhyay published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2016, round logos led people to attribute "softness and comfort" to a brand, angular logos "durability and sturdiness"; the same sneaker was assumed to be more comfortable when its logo was round and more durable when it was angular. That is why the choice of shape is not an aesthetic decision but a decision about what is promised: an angular mark for a baby product, or a round one for heavy machinery, contradicts its own advertising.

The most cited study in logo research was published in the Journal of Marketing in 1998 by Pamela Henderson and Joseph Cote. They measured hundreds of logos on twelve design dimensions and related them to recognition, recall, and liking. Three findings still hold today: "natural" marks that refer to a familiar object are recognized more easily than abstract ones; "harmonious" marks that carry symmetry and balance are liked more; and detail should stay at a moderate level, because overly detailed marks produce "false recognition," meaning people believe they have seen a mark they have never seen.

How Brands Grow, published in 2010 by Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and Building Distinctive Brand Assets, published by Jenni Romaniuk in 2018, widened this picture: a brand is remembered not by a logo but by a set of "distinctive assets," meaning color, shape, character, sound, and typography. Romaniuk measures these assets on two axes: fame (how many people link the asset to the brand) and uniqueness (how many people link it to this brand alone). A mark can be famous without being unique; the blue circle belongs to many brands. The real work of identity design is to build a set of assets that will score high on both axes; the logo is only one member of that set.

In an experiment published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2008, Gráinne Fitzsimons, Tanya Chartrand, and Gavan Fitzsimons showed participants the Apple or the IBM logo for durations too brief to notice; they then asked everyone to come up with as many uses for a brick as they could. Those exposed to the Apple logo produced significantly more, and more creative, ideas than those who had seen the IBM logo. The logo had carried the "Think Different" promise into behavior from below the threshold of awareness. The assumption that brand marks serve "only recognition" collapsed with this experiment.

Color works the same way. In Nature in 2005, Russell Hill and Robert Barton showed that in the boxing, taekwondo, and wrestling contests of the 2004 Athens Olympics, athletes wearing red won significantly more often against opponents of equal ability. In 2012, the Australian government went looking for "the world's ugliest color" for cigarette packs; seven studies that the research firm GfK ran with a thousand people produced Pantone 448C, a dark brownish olive green, and the packs were painted that color. Google, for its part, chose the blue of its search links in 2009 by testing 41 shades; in 2014, Dan Cobley, the company's UK managing director, disclosed that this one decision had brought in roughly $200 million a year in additional revenue. In an identity, color is not decoration but a measurable variable.

In January 2009, Tropicana redesigned its orange juice packaging in the United States: the orange with a straw stuck in it went, and a glass of orange juice took its place. Within two months sales fell by about 20 percent, the loss reached $30 million, and at the end of February the old packaging returned to the shelves. In October 2010, Gap replaced its thirty-year-old serif logo with Helvetica and a small blue square; the reaction was so harsh that the company went back to the old logo about six days later. The most expensive example is from 1985: on April 23, Coca-Cola changed its formula and its identity to "New Coke," and on July 11 it reversed course; 79 days.

What these three cases have in common is not design quality; in all three, the company touched an asset without measuring which asset consumers recognized. Zajonc's accumulation was wiped out in a day, and Henderson and Cote's "recognition" score was reset to zero. That is why the first step in a rebrand is not drawing but inventory: the fame and uniqueness scores of the existing mark, color, and shape are measured; the high-scoring asset is kept, and the low-scoring one is changed.

The United Kingdom's registered trademark No. 1 is a logo: the red triangle of the Bass brewery was registered on January 1, 1876, at the front of the line on the morning the new trademark law came into force. In the United States, registering a color on its own first became possible in 1987, when Owens-Corning registered the pink of its fiberglass insulation. Tiffany's blue is recorded at Pantone under a custom number: 1837, the year the company was founded. Cadbury, meanwhile, fought Nestlé in court for years to register its purple (Pantone 2685C) and lost in England's Court of Appeal in 2013; the grounds were not the color itself but that the phrase "predominant color" was found legally uncertain.

What these records tell design is this: ownership of a color or a shape is earned not by choosing it but by using it the same way for years. Courts ask whether it "has acquired distinctiveness," and the evidence is consistent use. That is why the color tolerance and clear space rules in an identity manual are not merely aesthetic discipline but the evidence file for a case that may one day be brought.

Nike's mark cost $35; in 1983 Knight settled the account by giving Davidson company stock and a diamond Swoosh ring. In 1986, Steve Jobs paid Paul Rand $100,000 for NeXT; Rand offered no alternatives, explained his single solution in a hundred-page booklet, and said, "If you want options, go talk to other people." The difference between the two figures is not the artistic value of the mark but the price of the method; Rand's booklet is less a drawing than a rationale for the decisions: why the form is what it is, which alternatives were eliminated and why, and how the mark will behave at which scales.

The research literature confirms this difference. The twelve dimensions Henderson and Cote measured, Jiang's round-versus-angular finding, Zajonc's repetition effect: none of these is simple enough to get right by intuition. A design fee is the price not of how many hours it took to draw the mark but of how many decisions this knowledge was used in.

We have turned this literature into a battery of tests and apply it in the same order on every identity project. For fluency, the five-second test: the mark is shown for five seconds, and the next day the person is asked to draw it; any detail that cannot be drawn leaves the system. For shape, the bouba-kiki survey: with ten pairs of adjectives, we measure which promise the mark carries and compare it with the positioning statement. In rebranding projects, Romaniuk's fame-uniqueness grid is applied to the existing assets; the high-scoring asset is left untouched. The last step is a registration search: earlier trademark records are checked for the shape and the color, because distinctiveness means the same thing in marketing and in law.

Knight was right: what makes a mark loved is not in the designer's hands but in the budget for repetition. What is in the designer's hands is a mark fluent enough to withstand that repetition, shaped correctly enough to carry that promise, and unique enough not to waste that budget. Science says we can measure all three.

Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2, Pt. 2), 1–27.

Reber, R., Schwarz, N. & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364–382.

Köhler, W. (1929). Gestalt Psychology. Liveright.

Ramachandran, V. S. & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(12), 3–34.

Bar, M. & Neta, M. (2006). Humans prefer curved visual objects. Psychological Science, 17(8), 645–648; (2007) Visual elements of subjective preference modulate amygdala activation. Neuropsychologia, 45(10), 2191–2200.

Jiang, Y., Gorn, G. J., Galli, M. & Chattopadhyay, A. (2016). Does your company have the right logo? Journal of Consumer Research, 42(5), 709–726.

Henderson, P. W. & Cote, J. A. (1998). Guidelines for selecting or modifying logos. Journal of Marketing, 62(2), 14–30.

Fitzsimons, G. M., Chartrand, T. L. & Fitzsimons, G. J. (2008). Automatic effects of brand exposure on motivated behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(1), 21–35.

Hill, R. A. & Barton, R. A. (2005). Red enhances human performance in contests. Nature, 435, 293.

Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow. Oxford University Press; Romaniuk, J. (2018). Building Distinctive Brand Assets. Oxford University Press.

Case records: Tropicana packaging change (January–February 2009); Gap logo change (October 2010); New Coke (April 23 – July 11, 1985); Bass registration (January 1, 1876); Owens-Corning color registration (1987); Société des Produits Nestlé v. Cadbury, EWCA Civ 1174 (2013); Australian plain packaging research, GfK (2012); Google "41 blues" test (2009) and Dan Cobley's statement (2014).