Logo Descriptiveness

What it is

Many logos carry text or imagery that tells the viewer what the brand does, and many carry only a shape or a name. Jonathan Luffarelli, Mudra Mukesh and Ammara Mahmood treated this as a dimension, from less to more descriptive, and asked how it affects brand equity, the value a brand adds beyond its product.

Their paper in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2019 begins from the observation that logo design is a common marketing decision about which little research existed. The question is practical for any identity stage of a branding engagement, because a team has to decide how much a mark should explain itself.

In effect

Across six studies, using mixed methods, the authors report that more descriptive logos improved consumer evaluations, purchase intentions and business performance. They attribute the effect to two linked mechanisms. Descriptive logos are easier to process, which is the idea covered on the Processing Fluency page, and that ease creates a stronger sense of authenticity, which consumers value.

The authors report two moderators. The benefit was smaller for familiar brands, which fits the account: a brand people already know has less need for its mark to explain it. The effect also reverses for brands with negative associations in consumers' minds, a boundary condition that the authors present as part of the result.

The authors also report that marketers may not be using the benefits of descriptive logos fully. For a team choosing between identity routes, the study supports testing how quickly people grasp what each route stands for, alongside whether they like it. Applying it to a new brand rests on the smaller benefit for familiar ones, and that step is an inference from the paper, not a result in it.

What it does not say

The findings above are those the authors report in the paper's abstract. No sample sizes, product categories or effect sizes are given here, because none are part of that report.

The studies measure evaluations, intentions and a business performance analysis, and they do not show what a descriptive logo does for a specific brand in a specific market. They also do not argue that abstract marks fail; they compare logos along one dimension and report a tendency that depends on how familiar the brand is.

---