Today I happened upon an interesting website regarding brand recognition. I have always suspected that peoples logo recall is not as brandmakers would hope. While hardly scientific the site seems to indicate that rather forcefully.

Premise: walk up to random people on the street and ask them to draw twelve famous logos, nine global three European (for the project was undertaken in Austria). The results were not encouraging.

Lots of people drew old logos such as the striped Apple apple and the BP badge. Others guessed the general idea, most remembered that the Peugeot logo was a lion but seemed to have no idea how it was positioned: sometimes lying sometimes standing. The Lacoste logo was remembered as vaugely reptilian, little more.

In one hilarious case the logo of a rival company was remembered, nestled among the attempts at reproducing the Coca-Cola script lay… the Pepsi orb, the old one, of course, another indication of the unwisdom of that infamous redesign.

The results should chill any executive planning to spend 1.2 billion dollars to fetch a new logo.