Your Logo Is Not Your Brand: What Nike, Apple and Tropicana Teach Us

A logo is the most visible part of a brand and the least important part of why people trust it. It is a signature. The brand is what people expect, remember and feel when they see that signature. The clearest way to see the difference is to look at companies that changed one without the other.

Nike's curved tick was drawn in 1971 by a design student, Carolyn Davidson, who was paid $35. The tagline "Just Do It" arrived in 1988. The tick on its own says very little; the effort and no-excuses attitude that Nike built around it for decades is the brand. The logo is the signature on the promise.

• Tiffany & Co. uses a custom Pantone shade numbered 1837, after the year the company began. People recognise the blue box before they read the name.
• Coca-Cola asked in 1915 for a bottle that could be recognised by touch, even when broken on the ground. The shape became part of the brand.
• Apple's 1997 "Think Different" campaign talked about the people who use Apple, not the specs. It sold a belief, not a feature list.
• Starbucks removed the words "Starbucks Coffee" from its logo in 2011 and kept only the siren. That works only because almost everyone already knows the brand.

People learn a logo like a shortcut. When it changes, something familiar feels taken away, and the reaction can be sharp. Tropicana changed its carton in January 2009; unit sales fell about 20% in the weeks that followed and the company went back to the old design in February. Instagram's 2016 icon drew a wave of anger that faded as people got used to it. When Air India launched "The Vista" logo in August 2023, reactions were split and many people criticised it.

The lesson is not that logos should never change. It is that a change should protect what people already recognise, and only update the rest.

• Write down what people should expect from you. That is the brand, and the logo should express it.
• List what people already recognise: a colour, a shape, a name, a phrase. Keep at least one of them.
• Test the change with real customers before a public launch.
• Change the logo as part of a clear business decision, never to chase a trend.

This is why every engagement here starts with the business, not the logo. A good identity is the visible proof of a decision about what you stand for, and the best ones change slowly because the people who trust them did not ask for it to change.