Meanwhile, participants who were shown the angular logo rated the same shoes as more durable compared to the other two groups. Participants who were shown a circular logo rated the shoes as more comfortable than participants in the other two groups. All students were shown an ad with a picture of a running shoe with the headline “Introducing the New Farber Shoes.” In the circular- and angular-logo conditions, the ads contained a picture of the shoe with the logo on both the shoe itself and at the bottom of the ad next to the Farber trademark.Īfter looking at the ad, participants rated the shoe for quality, comfort, and durability using a 9-point scale. The students were randomly assigned to one of three groups depending on the logo design they were shown: circular, angular, or no logo. In one experiment, 109 college students were asked to rate an ad for a new pair of running shoes. Additionally, the researchers anticipated that logo designs would also influence broad perceptions of a company – such as customer service quality.

With this in mind, the research team hypothesized that products advertised with circular logos would result in perceptions of greater product comfortableness, while angular logos would result in perceptions of heightened durability. However, lead author Yuwei Jiang (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and colleagues found that these associations extend far beyond a product’s physical qualities people not only associated round logos with physical “softness” but the roundness or angularity of a logo also had the power to conjure up complex associations.įor example, a round logo might evoke associations related to “softness,” including perceptions that a company is caring, warm, and sensitive to customer needs. Previous marketing research has suggested that circular shapes activate associations with softness, while angular shapes tend to activate associations with hardness. “Five experiments document that the mere circularity and angularity of a brand logo is powerful enough to affect perceptions of the attributes of a product or company,” the researchers write in the Journal of Consumer Research. The study, conducted by an international team of researchers, suggests that people make complex assessments of a company or product based merely on the shape of the logo. One Harvard Business Review writer declared, “he logo looks like something my pet hamster could cook up in PowerPoint.”īut new research suggest that there’s more to a logo than its basic aesthetic appeal. When the clothing retailer the Gap attempted to refresh its logo in 2010, the reaction from the public and the shareholders was harsh. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological ScienceĬompanies have been known to spend millions of dollars designing their corporate logos – for good reason.Psychological Science in the Public Interest.Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Aesthetic among us logo