Cover the logo: the test that shows what your brand really is

Jacob Rokeach, who describes himself on LinkedIn as founder and CEO of Fluency Firm, opened a recent post with ketchup. Ask people to draw it, he wrote, and almost all of them draw Heinz, even though nobody asking ever says the brand name.

The number behind that line comes from Heinz itself. For a 2021 campaign called Draw Ketchup, the company asked dozens of people on five continents to draw ketchup, then turned the drawings into limited edition bottles. The campaign's award entry reports that 97% of them drew Heinz. It was a marketing experiment, not a formal survey, and no method was published, so read it as a striking example rather than a statistic.

That gap between a logo and a brand is Rokeach's point, and it holds for a shop, a fleet or a showroom as much as a ketchup bottle. The name on the sign is rarely what people carry around in their heads.

A logo is one piece. A brand is what's left when it's gone.

In Rokeach's words, your logo is one piece of the puzzle, and your brand is everything people remember when the logo isn't there. He gave four examples, each one splitting the mark from the thing people actually recall.

He notes that people drew the Heinz details from memory without a second thought. He credits the iPod ads with dancing silhouettes for making the white earbuds so recognizable you could spot an iPod user from across the street. And with Tiffany, people know what's inside the box before anyone opens it.

None of them needed a logo refresh

The part that matters most for an owner comes next. None of these brands needed a fancy logo refresh to get there, Rokeach wrote. They picked a color, a shape or an object and used it so consistently that it started doing the work for them.

Consistency is the whole mechanism. A red sole only means something because it's on every pair, and a blue box only means something because it shows up every time.

Where a lot of brands get it backwards

According to Rokeach, many brands spend months debating the logo, then change the packaging and colors every time a new campaign comes around. The attention goes to the one piece people don't use to recognize you, while the pieces they do use keep shifting.

The local version is easy to picture. A contractor pays for a new logo, but the truck, the website, the invoices and the Google listing each use a different color and style. Nothing repeats, so nothing sticks.

How to run the cover-the-logo test on your own business

1. 01Gather a photo of your product, package, truck or storefront next to five competitors.
2. 02Cover or crop out every logo and business name, yours included.
3. 03Ask a few customers, or people who don't work for you, which one is yours.
4. 04If they can't tell, write down what could become the repeating signal: a color, a shape or an object.
5. 05Pick one and use it everywhere, the same way, before you spend on anything new.

What to hold off on

• A logo refresh, until you know whether anything else about you is recognizable.
• Changing colors or packaging for each new campaign.
• Adding more visual elements when one consistent element would do more.

The framing is Jacob Rokeach's, and the Heinz figure belongs to Heinz's own campaign. The practical takeaway for an owner is simple: decide what one thing should do the remembering for you, then keep it the same.