Does your company have the right logo? How and why circular- and angular-logo shapes influence brand attribute judgments
Jiang, Gorn, Galli and Chattopadhyay report five experiments testing whether a circular or angular logo shape changes perceptions of a product's or company's attributes. They propose that circular shapes evoke softness and angular shapes evoke hardness, with judgments shaped through mental imagery that draws on the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory. When working memory is occupied by irrelevant visual imagery the shape effects disappear, the effects depend on individual differences in imagery generation, and they also appear when people are primed incidentally. Journal of record: Journal of Consumer Research 42(5), 709-726, 2016 (online 2015).
Jiang, Gorn, Galli and Chattopadhyay report five experiments testing whether a circular or angular logo shape changes perceptions of a product's or company's attributes. They propose that circular shapes evoke softness and angular shapes evoke hardness, with judgments shaped through mental imagery that draws on the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory. When working memory is occupied by irrelevant visual imagery the shape effects disappear, the effects depend on individual differences in imagery generation, and they also appear when people are primed incidentally. Journal of record: Journal of Consumer Research 42(5), 709-726, 2016 (online 2015).
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex record, 2026-11-03; citation details from Crossref, 2026-11-03.
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Jiang, Y., Gorn, G. J., Galli, M., & Chattopadhyay, A. (2016). Does your company have the right logo? How and why circular- and angular-logo shapes influence brand attribute judgments. Journal of Consumer Research, 42(5), 709-726. doi:10.1093/jcr/ucv049 https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucv049