The hidden meaning of 40 famous brand logos

Do you ever wonder why certain brand logos are the way there are? Or why certain icons or strange looking type face are used in a companies logo? 

I do.

Brands can and often do spend significant amounts of time, research and money to ensure that their logo's are not only as memorable as possible, but have significance. The fact that the meaning or rationale behind many brand logo's are missed by the standard consumer suggests perhaps that some brands focus a little too much on the (hidden) meaning.

That said, from the obvious to the more mysterious, and the clever to the tacky, below is a great infographic that I first saw on Gizmodo that sheds some light on the often hidden meanings of some of the best well known brand logos out there.

Interesting reading.

7 differences between Social Media & SEO (Infographic)

There are some key differences between Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and for any marketer these differences are definitely worth understanding.

Gone are the days of 'Matching Luggage' (Link article worth a read)...well in reality sadly not for a lot of brands, but gone should be the days of matching luggage where the expensive hero television commercial is essentially rolled out across digital touch-points for all to hail the campaign as being 'integrated'. These brands then wonder why the digital element didn't meet over-inflated expectations. It was flawed to begin with!

Anyway, that could be an entire blog post in itself.

Social Media and SEO are ever evolving and both can have critical roles in helping a business achieve its objectives. Different marketing channels can have (and should have) different roles - the marketing content created for one channel does necessarily work for another, the marketing tactics created for one channel almost definitely will not maximise effectiveness when used on another.

The infographic below created by Orbit Media Studios explains some fundamental and important differences between the Social Media and SEO across seven categories. Understand each one to maximise both your Social Media and SE0 strategies and to manage expectations of both.

#1 - Speed
#2 - Upper limits
#3 - Topics
#4 - Formats
#5 - Audience Intent
#6 - Effort
#7 - Measurement

Social Media Growth (Infographic)

The infographic below created by Search Engine Journal at the back end of 2013 basically speaks for itself in that it gives an impressive graphic overview of how huge social media has become over the last decade.

Huge in terms of monthly active users on social media, time spent per day on it, mobile skew, and huge in terms of the number of brands considering it within their marketing.

Facebook leading the way

With 1.5 billion active monthly users and a 57% penetration rate in Australia (12 million people), Facebook is very much leading the way, but are brands reaping a positive ROI from platforms such as Facebook versus the time they put in? Across the board I am not convinced.

I think there was (and still is) a huge knee jerk reaction for brands to get themselves onto networks such as Facebook simply because 'everyone else is'. Don't misunderstand me here, some brands are getting an excellent return from their social media activity, but the brands that are are the brands that have specific objectives, specific budgets, and specific resources and roadmaps for social media itself. These brands have also moved away from the oh so very annoying and to be honest ridiculous metrics of success of likes and followers. The targeting tools on networks like Facebook are increasingly improving to the point of being pretty excellent, but with more and more people advertising on there, brands need to maintain creativity and proactivity (and a healthy media budget) to be noticed from the ever growing crowd.

Five great infographics on Slideshare (Using slideshare to share infographics)

A little rant..

I haven't done quite as many blog posts recently - partly because I've been a busy bee travelling this amazing world of ours for the last 8 months, but also in part because I am a tad frustrated with blogger...

Let me explain.

One of the many content mediums I like to use when blogging are infographics. A good infographic really fits that old adage of 'a picture is worth a thousand words', and sometimes (often), less is more. They are a great way of removing the clutter often surrounding facts, they bring life and fun to said facts, and are useful referencing material to go back to again and again.

For the past 12 months of writing this blog, I have found interesting infographics to share, and used Pinterest to pin the infographic from the authors website, and then embed into my blog. After a few months of doing this - and with Pinterests frequent updates, I realised the embedded Pinterest image often broke in my blog, leaving nothing more than a broken image link; annoying. I like Pinterest, but this is a fail on their part regarding this. I tried simply embedding the image itself into Blogger but there is a bug in Blogger where images over a certain size are corrupted, again making them ineligibly small.

So, here we are now - Rant over and solution found.

Slideshare to the rescue:

I have always liked the presentation sharing site slideshare. Not only is it an amazing knowledge bank where insights and stats are 'ten to the dozen', but it also has a huge content distribution/sharing/networking potential.

In recent weeks slideshare now has the functionality for publishers to upload and distribute their infographics, and tools for consumers to share them. The simple embed tools make it easy once again for bloggers like me to share infographics in a professional way. Gold star slideshare.

So, making up for lost time, below are five recent infographics that I like brought to you courtesy of the new slideshare functionality.

Chao.

A brief history of Marketing in an infographic

"Marketing started with the first human beings. Using the first Bible story as an example, we see Eve convincing Adam to eat the forbidden apple. But Eve was not the first marketer. It was the snake that convinced her to market to Adam."

The point being made in the excerpt from Kotler Marketing is that Marketing, in one form or another, has been around for a very long time. For as long as people have had something to trade or sell with one another, they have used a medium of marketing to persuade, manipulate, and influence people to choose their product over that of another.

From the birth of printed newspapers and advertising in the 15th century, to the tactics, intelligence, big data complexities, and creativity utilised in some modern day advertising. Marketing mediums and practice has changed dramatically and evolved astronomically over the years.

The history of modern marketing makes for an interesting read, and as with any evolutionary lineage gives you a nice understanding of how we got to the now, and who was involved. From the key dates, to the companies and people involved, the infographic below created by Hubspot provides an interesting top level history of marketing.

Digital Marketing Growth & Trends (INFOGRAPHIC)

The Rise of Digital...

Back in what now seems like the iceage, when Adwords had just began (Oct 2000), and banner ads on sites were just starting to be served by intelligent adservers, some of us knew-hoped that digital marketing was here to stay, dominate, and rapidly evolve.

Yet in 2006, I remember working down at the annual Internet World Convention in Earls Court London with my Digital Marketing Agency and being amazed at the huge (and I mean massive) line of Marketers lining up to listen to the Google Adwords for beginners seminar. For us as an agency the line and mass of people meant opportunity, an opportunity that resulted in a whole bunch of interesting big business wins for us. I just couldn't believe that some very big brands still didn't practice let alone understand very basic digital marketing tools and tactics.

Well 13 years after the launch of Google Adwords and wow - from mindsets and attitudes, to trends, technology and tactics - how things have changed for digital marketing.

I honestly believe that the masses in the marketing world both agency and client side are finally starting to get the value of digital marketing. Campaigns big and small are now considering digital at the initial stages of the creative and media planning stages and not just as an add on at the end. It really wasn't this way in some big agencies until very recently and for some the situation is still not perfect. That said, it's progress - and progress is good. As a digital man, it's great to see some of the more traditional advertising agencies coming up with some clever and successful digital marketing initiatives.

Below is an interesting infographic that shows just how much the digital marketing industry continues to grow.

The State of Social Media Marketing (Infographic)

SMM - Should we?

Since time began for Social Media Marketing (SMM), the big debate and quest for analysis of the 'return on investment' from SMM has long been the talk both in the marketing world, and the board room.

As many brands were barely getting the feet wet with basic digital marketing tactics, others were starting to realise the potential that SMM had, especially at first in terms of brand/product awareness, engagement, and being a valuable customer service channel.

Below is an interesting infographic by WishPond that shows the state of Social Media Marketing. It consists of data collated from a number of reputable sources (Experian, Hubspot, Social Bakers,
Nielsen).

The Psychology of a Great Athlete

Luck is where opportunity meets preparation

I once heard a saying - "Luck is where opportunity meets preparation", and how true. We live in a world where less fortunate people can be successful, and a world where fortunate people often fail. Maybe they get complacent, don't try as hard, or just don't realise how fortunate they actually are.

Success, winning, 'luck' are a direct result of your preparation, practice, endurance, tenacity, willingness to learn, and failing....often! One of my favourite ad campaigns was Michael Jordans 'Fail Harder' ad for Nike where it goes through all of his failures, yet despite these failures he was still arguably the best basketball player the world has ever seen.

The inspirational ad copy was "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." - Michael Jordan

From sports stars and business leaders, to our family and friends; there are many people we can learn from.

Social Media Networks by demographic (Infographic)

There is always a lot of discussion about Social media advertising.

• From the advertisers "does it work? How do I measure ROI"
• From the publishers "Yes it does, spend some more $$"
• From the industry "How to calculate your Social Media ROI....Social Media 101.." etc etc

According to a recent Nielsen Report, 64% of advertisers said they will increase their Social Media advertising budget this year, so it pays to know a bit about the audience, and how they differ.

When thinking about Social Media advertising, or simply activity on Social Media Networks, Marketers may have questions like?

• How do I get the best ROI from advertising via social Media?
• Does it work?
• Who is the audience?
• How is the audience changing?
• How does one network differ from another in terms of demographics?
• Etc etc?

Well, this post isn't isn't about answering all of those questions, it is about the audiences, and how they differ.

So, you want to be a Professional Photographer? (Infographic)

Photography is easy right? Smartphones pretty much constantly in our hands, our trigger finger ready to take another photograph that can quickly and easily be pimped up using an app filter (think Instagram, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter), to instantly give us a masterpiece that we then proudly share with the world.

But is being a professional photographer really that easy? Let alone making a decent living from it.

If you are a frequent reader of my blog, you will know I like infographics, but normally to display marketing insights, however coupled with my love of photography (note - I am not a great photographer), I had to share the infographic below that was created by Photo Seeds.

The infographic below aptly named 'So you want to be a Professional Photographer' basically explains in a rather satirical way, that being a professional photographer is not an easy task that any amateur can do.

Pinterest - Putting the IN in PIN

Since it's launch in 2009 Pinterest has experienced explosive growth. Some reports claim that active users on Pinterest in the US has caught up with Twitter, with 15% of adult internet users on each respective network. (Source - Tech Crunch).

Impressive.

The point is Pinterest continues to grow in terms of active users, functionality, and now its growing up by introducing its own analytics platform to capture the ROI crowd. Exciting times for Pinterest and marketers.

Below are a couple of inforgraphics that may of interest to new and old Pinterest users, which detail what it is (for those of you that don't know), the recent design and functionality updates, how people interact on Pinterest, and also Pinterest tools and other blog articles I have found useful.

Check Pinterest out, I believe there are a lot of marketing opportunities for brands and people using this platform. Don't be discouraged by the female majority demographic; the base continues to grow, evolve and attract new types of users. It's what you do with the platforms and how you market what you do that will attract people.

To This Day - A Poem about Bullying

This short emotion fuelled TED Talk by poet Shane Koyczan that has recently gone viral is a powerful live recital of his poem that gets to the heart of what it is like for young people to be "young and different". It brings bullying into the foreground and despite it being a personal story of bullying and survival, it will and has resonated with many.

Shane's heartfelt poem "To This Day", flits between hilarious and haunting and is supported by amazing crowd sourced animation from 80 illustrators, and a live violinist. Very powerful and well worth taking a few minutes out of your day to watch.

This talk is for anyone who is being or has been bullied, or is a bully, or knows someone who fits either of these profiles.

The Evolution of the Music Industry in a few Infographics

Music is everything to me, and also to a lot of people in the world. I work with it on, I exercise with it on, I chill with it on, I write and perform it with my friends whenever I can, and I go to gigs and festivals. The point is, music is big business with huge demand, and as an avid music fan, I want to listen to as much of it as I can, whilst also financially benefiting the artist themselves.

Over recent years, there has been a HUGE paradigm shift to the way we initially get music, listen to it, and then share with our friends, and this is exciting for a music lover. The key culprit for this is.........Digital.

From the medium, storage, and distribution of music to the huge and influential role that social media now plays in the music industry, below are a few interesting music related infographics. The common and completely unsurprising theme in all of them is how the rise digital has completely and utterly changed the music industry, from a commercial and consumer consumption perspective.

On a side note....as much as I love digital and all the opportunities it has given, I still argue that nothing beats the sound of vinyl, may we never lose this!

Top 20 Fast Food Brands on Social Media

Fast food - love it or hate it, the fast food industry is huge, and continues to grow. In Australia alone it is worth $16bn a year, and has an annual growth of about 4%. (Source)

If 'convenience' was a chess piece, think of it as a Queen or a Rook. It's the top trump. No matter how many consumer research groups, documentaries, and general bad publicity fast food retailers have constantly biting at their ankles, the 'proof is in the pudding'; convenience prevails. I guess the masses are just too damn busy (and hungry) to care.

And that is what amazes me. I actually almost admire the fast food industries ability to constantly re-invent / re-position themselves, and prevail despite the constant surge of negativity around them.

Social Media, education and customer service plays a major part in some of the major fast food retail brands strategies, especially where the brands can now be publicly attacked, and their responses are open to the world to see.

The Psychology of Choice & Illusion

Choice - "An act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities" .

What makes us choose right from left, or one offer from another? Did we ever really have a choice, or was it the result of some marketers clever strategy of influence and illusion?

So many choices!

We are presented with many 'choices' every single day, many of them delivered to us through the mask of marketing, and calculated data driven decision making. A great example of 'choice' and clever data driven product placement is in Supermarkets. From the size of the offers signs, the number of offer 'choices', to the placement of the products throughout the store. There is often a fairly solid rationale in the decision making for the above.

Ever get to the checkout at the Supermarket and you end up buying more unnecessary yet conveniently placed items and offers, while you wait impatiently to be served? Yep - I do!

A brief history of YouTube in an infographic

In 8 years Youtube has grown from 0 to 800 million monthly unique users, 72 hours of uploaded every minute, and 4 billion hours of video viewed each month. There's no wonder YouTube is the #2 search engine, after...you guessed it Google; who actually owns it.

Below is a simple and interesting infographic by Shorty Media showing YouTubes incredible evolution.

50 things you may not do anymore due to technology

It's amazing how quickly technology has evolved in the last 100 years, where routine tasks of the not-so-distant past have been replaced with automation, and where faster-quicker-better is the philosophy. Convenience, efficiency and effortless tasks for this generation replace a weekly chore for the older generation. Famous mathematician Vernor Vinge called this exponentially accelerating change, which basically means "accelerating progress leading to the emergence of more and more sophisticated technologies separated by shorter and shorter time intervals, until a point beyond human comprehension is reached. "

Whilst I am outrageously dependent on technology and all for convenience and removing the laborious tasks from my life, I can't help but feel slightly melancholy when looking down at the infographic below by Mozy. From video tape, to making mix cassettes, to written letters, and using the public phone box. Perhaps we are, at times, too reliant and focused on technology. Did life used to be simpler and seem more personal? Are we a lot more productive and connected now? It's probably a bit of both.

Colour: A Marketers tool of influence

Colour; something that a lot of us may take for granted, and fewer understand, yet something that can have a huge influence on so many of the decisions we make. Colour can influence our emotions and our mood, it can influence the things you take notice of and the things that you miss, and it can affect us physiologically.

For most of us, colour is simple; something is red, something is green, yet just like the majority of the Beatles songs, simple things if used and understood properly can go a long long way. Colour has the potential to be a very powerful string not just to the marketers bow, but also in everyday life and social perception.

Here are eleven popular colours with a brief description of what they stand for, the emotions they evoke, and the known physiological responses.

Digital Marketing & Social Media tools guide

Digital Marketing - How do I....? 

Here's a generic situation, which may sound very familiar to some.

A buddy approaches me and asks for some marketing help. The last few years of slogging it out in a job they care little about has paid off, they now have a business idea of their own, some money in the bank, and a revived focus for their career. They are untouchable, fired up with energy and ambition, and all they want to do is get stuck straight into their new project, make things happen and make some $. It's time for them to let the world know, but the problem is they don't know how to, or better put, they don't know the best way to do so. So they look on the web and can quite easily be pulled in every direction by the pure volume of articles, 101's, books, video's, guides and expert opinions.

So after spending a few weeks/months learning, trying, failing, succeeding (repeat), they ask their buddy who works in Marketing for help, as he must know!...

• How do I get my site ranked on Google?
• How do I know if my marketing is working?
• What marketing should I be doing?
• Should I set my brand up on Social Media?
• How do I monitor my brand on Social Media?
• Should I use 'this' tool? Should I pay for 'this' service?
• Etc

Guide to the Wonderful World of Clients - infographic

Every now and again, you read something 'industry related' that makes you chuckle. Why? Because it resonates and bars some (or a lot) of truth.

The infographic below created by ciplex is one of those things. As I read through the infographic I fondly reminisce about a handful of challenging clients who initiated me in the art of diplomacy and pushed patience boundaries to unknown heights!

Since working client side, I definitely have more sympathy for some clients situations. Things most definitely aren't always as they seem from agency land perspective, I mean all clients can't be stupid right!
That said, some are very challenging so have a chuckle as you read over the infographic and remember some of your 'fun' clients.

Are gadgets before bed affecting your sleep? (Infographic)

"When I go to bed I use my ipad/phone to:"

- Browse the web / Use social media
- Watch a film or something on Youtube
- Stream music via an online service like Spotify
- Read an ebook
- Play a game (words free / chess.com etc)
- Text / Call

Sound familiar?

I think the above is an accurate account of many of our pre-sleep habits, definitely is for me and apparently is for 95% of the population!

Online Psychology Degree have put together a fantastic infographic called 'Getting in Bed with Gadgets - Your Technology is keeping you awake' and it's about, well, what it says on the tin really! Using technology just before you go to sleep is detrimental to a) getting to sleep and b) actual sleep loss; all of which affects your mental well being, in a bad way.

36 Faces of Facebook Fans - which one are you?

I recently wrote an article Has too much social media turned you into a zombie that had a brilliant halloween themed infographic created by confused.com that compared social media users to types of zombies...(it was Halloween!!). Well, to continue the themed pigeonholing of social media users, or I should say, the known user types that are found on Facebook, I wanted to share this great and amusing slideshare presentation by Soap Creative that attempts to categorise the 1 billion+ Facebook users into 36 types of users.


From 'The Firsty', 'The Hater', 'The Expert', 'The Moral Highgrounder' to 'The Drawler', 'The Spammer', 'The Wannabe' and the 'Troll'; there is something for everyone.

Engaging, funny, true, and interesting. Enjoy.

Has too much social media turned you into a Zombie?

Many of us (me included) spend a considerable time using social media. This is no bad thing, amongst other things it keeps you connected to friends and family, up-to-date with news you probably wouldn't have known about otherwise, and engaged with other like minded people.

But some of us can get (at times) a little obsessed with it, you know the person who can't seem to put their phone down when in a restaurant, or has to check it when in the cinema, or must tag someone on a night out. That person is normally me, and it annoys the hell out of friends! Again, not necessarily all bad, but sometimes we can perhaps get a little too 'addicted' to it, if addiction is the right word.

With Halloween in mind, Confused.com have put together a great, Halloween themed, slightly satirical infographic, comparing obsessive social media users to zombies.

Facebook's Edgerank explained in an Infographic

Below is a short summary about my thoughts on Facebook's Edgerank and peoples obsession with increasing their fans. Don't get me wrong, I think the fan base metric is important, but would argue engagement rate and dialogue with fans / prospective fans is more important. It's a quality over quantity thing. If you can have both, even better - but work upwards from the lowest hanging fruit aka 'quality'. Perhaps this analogy doesn't even fit, as 'quality' is actually one of the hardest things to get right, and is the element that is often comprimised!

Within the marketing landscape, I am constantly seeing articles and video 'how to's' describing how I can (a) 'Increase my fans / followers', (b) 'Get my website better ranked in Google and (c) basically do a better job with minimal effort and maximum success....

Digital Evolution in an Infographic

Remember the time when computers were the new (and expensive) fad, where mobile phones were as big as bricks, and where everyone was addicted to playing snake. Well, relatively speaking that time wasn't really that long ago! 

The pace at which technology is evolving is pretty astonishing and exciting - E.g nowadays the question isn't "do you have a camera on your phone", its "what mega-pixel is your camera on your phone".

Live life and don't regret

It's easy to get so wrapped in our own little worlds, to be thinking / worrying about the future that it taints the present, and then what happens? We get old or ill and then regret all the things that we should have done and didn't but suddenly have no more time?

I really hope I am not that guy. I want to embrace the 'now' as much as possible and when I die, look back with a smile and a heart free of regret. But it's so easy to be saying the statement above one moment and then falling back into the grind of things like living to work the next.

How many fake followers do you have on Social Media? INFOGRAPHIC

Interesting #infographic showing the number of fake followers people have on Twitter. I totally disagree with companies that 'buy' followers. It's the anti-thesis of building an engaged audience!

Recent stats show that fake followers for some big brands / celebrities can be over 30% - which is a lot!

There is a great free tool http://fakers.statuspeople.com/ that allows you to see the authenticity of your personal or brands followers on Twitter. Thankfully only 7% of my Twitter followers are fake.

Full article via Mashable

Screenshot of the report below.

47 Mind-Blowing Psychological Facts You Should Know About Yourself

Found a great and informative article on Business Insider by Susan Weinschenk this morning all about the 100 psychological things people should know about people. There are loads of videos, and the article is really well considered / written. All in all, a great post.

Obviously, there is a general life benefit of understanding people, but aside from this the focus here is about understanding people for marketing purposes; so website design etc. This very much ties into my recent blog post Digital Marketing & Social Media - My thoughts on todays landscape where I state my belief that 'People' should be key to all marketing (and indeed a life philosphy) 

Here is the intro to wet your appetite:

"I’ve decided to start a series called 100 Things You Should Know about People. As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application.

 Or maybe just 100 things that everyone should know about humans!"

Full article here:47 Mind-Blowing Psychological Facts You Should Know About Yourself