Hey, it’s Al Bergeron, Chief Creative Officer of bergeroncreative.com, and this is The Brand Whisperer Briefing, where I provide practical brand strategies that will grow your corporate or personal brands. Giving you greater influence in today’s technology driven society.

On this week’s episode I’m going to discuss symbols. Here are examples of companies that use symbols; Shell, Target, Domino’s and Timberland. Symbols employ simple, literal graphics and pictorial representations to portray the brand meaning or an attribute. Often symbols start as combination marks using the brand name and over time the associated type is dropped as the brandmark builds recognition.

Here are the advantages symbols: • Pictorial graphics enhance the brand message • Used to shorten long brand names • Name no longer represents the brand

Here are the disadvantages symbols: • Often requires more promotion • Potential cultural miscommunication • Can be confused with other brand symbols

So, your homework for this week is to answer these questions, to determine if a symbol would best represent your brand: Do pictorial graphics enhance my brand message? Is my brand name long?

That’s it for this week. Have a great week! On the next episode of The Brand Whisperer Briefing I will discuss brand standards.