New Starbucks Logo is Localization Friendly

Four logos in 40 years

Starbucks announced today the roll-out of its new logo as of March 2011, when the company celebrates its 40th anniversary. The main change is the elimination of the words "Starbucks Coffee" from the iconic brand image.

The new wordless version of the logo -- in addition to allowing the company to expand its product offerings beyond coffee -- makes it easier to penetrate more international markets, especially those that don't use latin characters. The company already has 400 stores in China and plans to open more in the future.

Branding people at Starbucks monitored the performance of companies like Nike and Apple, which had earned enough recognition with consumers to drop the words from their logos.

From a localization perspective, using words in logos generates branding issues that require several types of adaptation. These are not unsurmountable, but might be avoided by using only images.

Coca-Cola is a good example. The brand is in virtually every country in the world and sounds basically the same everywhere. However, its famous trademark needs to be displayed in different scripts according to the locale where the product is sold.

Another problem with word-based brands is pronunciation. SC Johnson launched the line of Glade Air Fresheners in Brazil as Gleid (so that Brazilians could pronounce it correctly and not as the word glad). It has only recently relaunched the brand with the English spelling after research showed that the brand had become a household name with something close the English sound.

A very good practice when it comes to brands in international markets is to perform a linguistic brand assessment to ensure that the words mean what they are supposed to mean. You want to make sure that the written and pronounced words don't have any negative or derogatory connotations in foreign languages.  I always remember an assessment for Mimeo.com, which sounds like "my urine" in Spanish. Or Chana Motors in Brazil, which sounds like a vulgar word for vagina in Brazil (thanks to Daniela do Carmo).

Finally, another element to take into consideration is color. An excellent recent post in the COLOURlovers blog about top web brands and a study by Interbrand about corporate brands show that blue is the dominant color among the top brands. Starbucks seems to be the only corporate brand that will use only green as it is brand color.

If you know of any interesting stories about global branding, please add a comment and share it with us.

Starbucks in Russia