This impacts marketing, naturally, and has led to the latest logo trend, the wordless logo. Here are the studies behind the move.
Advertising Is Failing
Writing for Digiday, copywriter Mark Duffy drew on his decades of experience to compile the compelling case against advertising’s effectiveness. Here are the salient points: He notes that many expect free services and products, but rely on ad-blockers at the same time. And that even the ironic “no sell” ads lose effectiveness once the novelty wears off. How about social media advertising — all those retweets and likes must add up to something? Yes, they add up to approximately nothing worth anything: Only 5 percent of people say social media has ‘a great deal of influence’ on their purchasing decisions, according to a 2014 Gallup State of the American Consumer report; 30 percent copped ‘some influence.’”
The Solution? Fewer Words.
How do you advertise with less actual advertising? By staying in the background. Squarespace, for instance, sponsors a huge number of YouTube channels and podcasts, but never interferes with the editorial side. In this model, the video or podcast creator will read out a few lines of copy about a service or product that they genuinely support, just like a 1940s radio might promote that bar soap that Baby Boomers care about so much. But for company branding materials, there’s no escaping the inherent need to advertise. One quote from a recent Atlantic article by Kalle Oskari Mattila features Adam Alter, an associate professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business: “Companies have had to learn subtlety,” he said of the latest branding tactics. The rise of the wordless logo is explored further in the same article: What does this mean for a startup in 2016? A wordless logo will appeal to the 20s-30s early adaptor crowd you need to connect with. Let your audience figure out that they want your product, rather than tell them. You’ll need to rely on word of mouth above a text-heavy sizzle reel. But hey, at least every other corporation has to do the same, from MasterCard’s abstract circles to McDonalds’ two-limp-french-fry-looking golden arches.
