Brand New: How Visual Context Shapes Initial Response To Logos and Corporate Visual Identity Systems

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 consumers’ initial response to logos. While other studies have researched the impact of aesthetic choices on viewer reaction to logos, few researchers have attempted to understand the effect of the surrounding visual identity system when a new logo is introduced. This study combines a content analysis of 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. The study also takes into account the different types of context that can be presented – from logo variations and environmental examples to videos and animation – and their varied effects. Results show that most types of visual context correlate to improved viewer response

Understanding Perceptual And Conceptual Fluency At A Large Scale

We create a dataset of 543,758 logo designs spanning 39 industrial categories and 216 countries. We experiment and compare how different deep convolutional neural network (hereafter, DCNN) architectures, pretraining protocols, and weight initializations perform in predicting design memorability and likability. We propose and provide estimation methods based on training DCNNs to extract and evaluate two independent constructs for designs: perceptual distinctiveness (“perceptual fluency” metrics) and ambiguity in meaning (“conceptual fluency” metrics) of each logo. We provide evidences of causal inference that both constructs significantly affect memory for a logo design, consistent with cognitive elaboration theory. The effect on liking, however, is interactive, consistent with processing fluency (e.g., Lee and Labroo (2004), and Landwehr et al. (2011))