icons without company name

Established Well-Known Brands That Are Known By Their Icon Alone

January 8th, 2011 | Posted in Blog, marketing | 1 Comment
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This past week it was announced that Starbucks was dropping the typographic part of their logo. Their brand identity has changed four times over the years and what’s fascinating about this change is the fact that they were limited by the types of products they could produce simply due to their logo. It said, “Starbucks Coffee” around the graphic siren image. Now that they have dropped the words and will use only the image they can expand beyond coffee products as they move into more grocery stores.

Starbucks has changed it's brand identity 4 times.

How many companies out there are known simply by their icons without the name being shown. How well-established must a brand be, to feel secure enough to drop the name and only use their iconic image?

So many well known brands use their name in their logo and so this couldn’t happen for them, such as FedEx, UPS, Verizon, Staples, Coca-Cola, Campbell’s, Levi’s, The Gap, etc… But here are a few icons that don’t use or need their name attached because we don’t need to see it. We know who they are!

In a search on Google of iconic brands, I was very selective deciding which examples to show, absolutely sure that everyone knows just what company they represent and there is no caption needed. Can you think of other brands who are so well-known, we don’t need to see their name to know them?