What Your Music Looks Like: Logo & Image

The art of storytelling is a device that has framed cultures and shaped societies, giving context and meaning for people to understand the world they live in. Stories are powerful because they construct societal norms and guide behavior. More importantly for our purposes here, they’re also how people make sense of and understand your art.

One would think the most powerful stories are the ones that use simplicity so that they can be easily passed on with less friction. However, in branding, the most powerful stories are not always the ones where everything is spelled out. They’re the ones that work because they rely on the audience to use their own common sense to fill in the gaps.

What do cowboys have to do with cigarettes? Cheeseburgers with clowns Geckos with car insurance?

The answer is nothing. In these examples, there’s no inherent association between one thing and the other thing. Yet those born into a culture that conditions them for highly visual and story-oriented processing will try to fill in the blanks. They will tell themselves a story to make the arbitrary associations make sense – maybe that cowboys are known smokers or John Wayne was rumored to have smoked six packs a day.

No matter the arbitrary stories they come up with, you can likely identify the company that produced these associations.

Cowboys and cigarettes = Marlboro

Cheeseburgers and clowns = McDonald’s

Geckos and car insurance = Geico

These companies have chosen to tell the story of their products through their brands. And they do so by selling something other than just the product: the power of imagery. 

Logos Tell a Story

Musicians looking to brand themselves often overlook how powerful imagery can be. Something as simple as a strong logo or iconic band photo can often communicate what an entire EPK (electronic press kit) cannot.

Consider the logos of The Beatles or The Doors, Wu-Tang Clan or Naughty by Nature, Nirvana or Nine Inch Nails, even The Rolling Stones. 

These designs are immediately recognizable. Not only are they mimicked throughout pop culture, but they’re heavily symbolic. A good logo draws upon and uses the audience’s common sense to compartmentalize where something belongs. The ancient Greeks referred to this as doxa, as in “to appear,” “to seem,” “to think,” or “to accept.” When a symbol is already working off our cultural associations and then becomes a part of our cultural common sense, it gains power from what we think we already know about it, from what we take for granted. 

A brand can tell an entire story through one logo. 

Marlboro cigarettes were originally identified as a feminine high-style cigarette until the company decided to reposition the product in the market as a masculine one (Benison, 2018). They tapped into a story: “the cowboy, the American West with its vast, rugged, and beautiful landscapes, hard work, horses, cattle, the strong, silent kind of machismo that we’ve all learned to associate with cowboys in countless Hollywood movies” (Streeter, 2012).

The Marlboro man was born out of a search for brand identity, but also one company’s typology of what masculinity means to the common male consumer. By using powerful associations already embedded in the American psyche, Marlboro was able to draw upon and use that power to associate two things that have very little to do with one another: cowboys and cigarettes. 

In much the same way, the Wu-Tang Clan draws upon and produces the same associational hooks in their branding. Their logo, the “W,” is iconic for a reason. With its sharp ninja star edges and easternized font, it easily marries itself to the stories of Shaolin Kung Fu, the old movie samples reproduced in Wu-Tang’s music, and overall works off both the first letter in the group’s name and the classic two-blade weapons normally thrown to decapitate enemies in Kung Fu flicks. A version of the Wu-Tang logo is reiterated to the public through similar designs that mark the logos of the artists in their collective, including RZA, GZA, and Method Man. 

Mathematics, the artist who drew the original logo for RZA, often talks in interviews about how the design was produced by merging the Shaolin narrative with other already iconic symbols, such as the Batman symbol and the Warner Bros. logo. Those associational hooks already dig deep, so whatever additional narrative the group superimposes over the original one becomes a layer. Now, the logo communicates much more than iconic symbolism or a Batman siren call cast into the night sky. It’s symbolic for being a departure from pop-influenced over-commercialized rap music, a Cinderella story where New York street kids coming from nothing embraced the gritty, dark nature of Staten Island to make smart, interesting rap music with style and substance. 

When people see the Wu-Tang logo printed on a T-shirt or coffee mug, it communicates something about an era and style of music in hip-hop culture, about taste – and it does it implicitly, by having the audience use their common sense to fill in the gaps.

What Does Your Logo Say About You?

Ask yourself what story your brand is telling, and think about how that can be communicated using the common sense of the consumer. Logos are meant to be packed with meaning and say a lot with little information.

When your logo appears on a T-shirt or a flyer, you want it to be more than just something that looks cool. You want it to hook people by using powerful associations already embedded in their psyche so that they understand it without you having to explain it to them, so that it stands in for your story and allows you to differentiate yourself. 

Source: Streeter, T. (2012, December). Semiotics and Advertising. Retrieved January 5, 2020, from http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiotics_and_ads/.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr user Craig Berscheidt