Interesting Concepts and the Unbelievable Amounts of Money Spent on Iconic Logos

When we start talking about logos, we stop looking ahead for a while and stop our association with it on the borders of the branding frontier but logos have had a deep, rich and an immensely interesting history with most of them having intriguing histories into their formation and budgets.

A logo is an artistic personification of your brand ideology and it is used to serve the purpose of providing a “Face” which people can associate with the name of the brand but there is more than which meets the eye in some of them which are sure to make you interested in finding more about them, let’s look at some of the most amazing stories that iconic logos hide beneath their immense popularity and mass appeal:

Coca-Cola:

Who would have thought that one of the most recognizable logos would be made in Spencerian script, which was one of the types of fonts used by people pursuing penmanship at the time. Frank M. Robinson was an initial partner and a bookkeeper by profession when he designed this logo as he believed that two C’s would work wonders in marketing the soft drink, hence the logo came to life.

It might now be worth billions of dollars as a trademark of the company but it was designed for $0, funny thing isn’t it?

London Olympics 2012:

The organizing committee shelled out £400,000 to acquire a logo for this iconic competition which still retains a massive audience over the whole globe. The committee assigned the task to Wolf Ollins in 2007, but it didn’t live up to its hype, instead became controversial due to its resemblance to a woman performing oral sex and being quite untidy at the same time.

The BBC Logo:

Commissioned in 1997, it is still in use due to its wide application capability that allows the organization to use it simultaneously to represent every department, whether it’s television or radio but the price tag is a bit more complex as compared to the logo’s simplicity and brevity. Designed in Gill Sans font, the cost of the BBC logo was a mind-boggling $1.8 million when it came out.

British Petroleum (BP):

When it comes to spending through the nose when acquiring a logo for your brand, BP outstrips everyone by a distance by getting a logo for nearly $211 million from Ogilvy and Mather back in 2008 in an effort to revamp its image in the mind of the people as firm which is committed towards people’s concerns as an energy company. What a belligerent attitude this firm retains when it comes acquiring the best!

Interestingly when there was an oil spill related to BP around the same time this logo was commissioned, it caused image problems which couldn’t be solved by this logo alone.

Google for Zero:

When it came to designing a logo for the now most famous search engine on the planet by a fair distance, Google’s co- founder Larry Page designed it on the free graphics program GIMP with a vibrant design using a lot of color iterations. The logo has undergone major transformations but it still retains immense resemblance to the original one prepared by Larry.
The green color used for the letter “L”in the Google logo signifies Google’s ideology of not follow predefined rules as all the other colors used in rest of the letters are primary colors.

A logo certainly has avalue which cannot be ascertained in monetary terms but having said that logos are certainly influential in building your brand image and positioning in the mind of the consumer. Each company has its own ideology to follow when it comes down to getting a logo as these logos have just as rich stories as works of art, so when the next time you need a logo for your organization, try to get a story going behind it as well as in its portray of your brand to create a mesmerizing and memorable effect which can linger in the minds of the consumer for the times to come.