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Brand Identity: Will the real Apple please stand up?
Posted under Personal Brand Definition by Linda Griffin
There is a hot debate going on at the Mashable blog. Seems that Australian based Woolworths Limited has unveiled a logo which looks suspiciously like the Apple computer logo. The company sells a variety of products and brands such as food & grocery, liquor, gasoline, general merchandise and consumer electronics. According to Woolworths, the new logo is a stylized “W” paired with an “abstract leaf symbol”. When building a brand identity, the question I always ask is whether the logo supports the company’s brand and does it adhere to the rules of good logo design.
Visiting Woolworth’s web site I see that their tag line is ‘The fresh food people’ and the copy focuses on their supermarket brand. When viewed in this context, the logo does look a bit like an apple but that doesn’t automatically mean it infringes on the Apple logo. If I take off my glasses and squint, it looks like a green tomato. Or as one person said in the comments to the Mashable post, it looks like a pumpkin. All of those images give the impression of fresh produce which ties nicely to the tag line.
Now let’s see if the logo holds up under analysis of good logo design:
- Can you describe it? Yes. It’s an abstract letter ‘W’ with a leaf on top.
- Is it memorable? Yes. It’s very distinctive and you will be able to recognize it.
- Is it effective in plain black and white? Yes. The shape is very clean without a lot of detail.
- Is it scalable? Yes. It looks just as good when used in a small print ad as when it is on the side of a produce truck.
If Woolworths’ goal is to convey the idea of fresh produce, the logo they’ve come up with does achieve that goal, especially when paired with the tag line. Whether or not it infringes on the Apple logo, I’m happy to defer to the lawyers.