What customers feel becomes what your logo means
Everyone Got Mad. Nobody Checked.
Why speed beats truth online, and what that means for what you share.
We’re so focused on branding these days that we forget logos, websites, and packaging aren’t branding. They’re the cherry on top of the sundae.
We look at the Nike logo and think it stands for greatness, but it’s only great because Nike is great.
Apple’s logo is literally an apple with a bite taken out of it. Kind of on the nose, you think?
Coca-Cola’s logo was a custom design inspired by the popular 19th century American handwriting style at the time.
In hindsight, all three of those iconic American brands made their branding great. Not the other way around.
Recently, I had a chance to talk about this with Chris Kaufman, co-founder and former Chief Creative Officer of StockX and author of Empathy at Work. He has spent his career building brands that move culture.
But he is clear about what brand is not.
“A lot of times marketing leaders and CEOs become obsessed with the visual brand identity of a company,” he said. “Which is important. But it’s not going to solve your problems.”
He was straight forward.
“If you’re having issues with trust with your customers, it’s not going to make them feel any differently about your company if you get a new logo,” Chris said. “If they’re frustrated with your customer service experience, if your shipping times are slow, if they don’t care for your return policy.”
Then he delivered the line that should be framed in every office. “There’s no amount of visual lipstick that is going to solve any of these problems.”
That is the part most people miss. We treat brand like a design exercise. A new font. A new color palette. A sleek brand film. We hope the polish will change perception.
But customers reverse engineer meaning.
Apple and Nike are not trusted because of their logos. Their logos are trusted because of the experiences those companies built.
“Apple and Nike are great examples of two companies that could probably have almost anything for their logo and would still be successful,” Kaufman said. “They could change those logos and people would probably still buy their phones and computers and sneakers.”
“You can have a terrible company with a subpar product, terrible customer service, awful culture,” Chris said. “You can get the best design firm in the world to create a logo and brand identity, and it’s not going to solve any of those problems.”
That is not a design problem. That is a people problem.
“What a brand identity does is it ties customers into that experience, whatever it may be, and it becomes memorable,” he said. “It becomes the signature.”
The signature of what? Of how your people show up.
Brand is how you respond to a complaint and how your manager handles a mistake. It’s whether your culture runs on fear or ownership.
In his book Empathy at Work, Kaufman argues that vulnerability and compassion are not soft skills. They are smart leadership. Because internal culture always leaks into external perception.
If employees feel unseen, customers will feel it. If teams feel respected and aligned, customers will feel that too.
You do not build a brand from the outside in. You build it from the inside out.
Your logo is a symbol.
You and your people are the brand.
