Company Logos and their Meanings

Ever wondered what company logos mean and whats the significance behind them? Wonder no more!

You might think the arrow does nothing here. But it says that amazon.com has everything from a to z and it also represents the smile brought to  
the customer's face. Wow, that is quite deep.

 
Am not sure how many of you have noticed a hidden symbol in the Federal Express logo.
Yeah, I am talking about the 'arrow' that you can see between the E and the x in this logo. The arrow was introduced to underscore speed and precision, which are part of the positioning of the company.


 The old logo of Baskin Robbins had the number 31 with an arc above it. The new logo took this idea to the next level. The pink parts of the BR still form the number 31, a reference to the 31 flavours.


 Carrefour is one of the biggest European retailers, and its also French for crossroads. The logo symbolizes this word via two opposite arrows. They also added the first letter of the name, because if you look closely youll see the letter C in the negative space between the two arrows.

 
 At first, this logo might not make much sense. But if you look closely, youll see the number 1 in the negative space between the F and the red stripes. I also love how this logo communicates a feeling of speed.


 The NBC (National Broadcasting Company) is one of the biggest American television networks. I think most of you have already seen the peacock in this logo. The peacock has 6 different tail feathers, referring to the six divisions at the time that this logo was created. The peacocks head is flipped to the right to suggest it was looking forward, not back.


Sony Vaio is a well known brand of laptops. But did you know that the name Vaio logo also had a hidden meaning? Well, the first two letters represent the basic analogue signal. The last two letters look like a 1 and 0, representing the digital signal.


Toblerone is a chocolate-company from Bern , Switzerland . Bern is sometimes called The City Of Bears. They have incorporated this idea in the Toblerone logo, because if you look closely, youll see the silhouette of a bear.



Unilever is one of the biggest producers of food, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products. They produce a huge amount of different products and they wanted to reflect this in their logo. Each part of the logo has a meaning. For example: the heart represents love, care and health - feeling good, a bird is a symbol of freedom. Relief from daily chores “ getting more out of life.

Paul Rand (who designed the iconic IBM logo in 1972) designed this 'eye bee M' logo in 1981. I like that they are quite relaxed about the logo, unlike certain other companies who do not like the logo to be tampered with in any way even for internal promotions


The SUN Microsystems logo is a wonderful example of symmetry and order. It was a brilliant observation that the letters u and n while arranged adjacent to each other look a lot like the letter S in a perpendicular direction. Spectacular.
 
The above are two magazines from the Readers Digest stable. Again, the attempt to communicate what it is about quite figuratively through the logo catches my attention.


This was a logo created for a puzzle game called Cluenatic. This game involves unravelling four clues. The logo has the letters C, L, U and E arranged as a maze. and from a distance, the logo looks like a key


Eighty-20 is a small consulting company which does sophisticated financial modeling, as well as some solid database work. All their work is highly quantitative and relies on some serious computational power, and the logo is meant to convey it.

People first guess that 20% of the squares are darkened, but that turns out to be false after counting them. The trick is to view the dark squares as 1's and the light squares as 0's. Then the top line reads 1010000 and the bottom line reads 0010100, which represent 80 and 20 in binary.

Kinda like the surreal green screen of The Matrix, they want us to read stuff in binary

Why Should TRAI Restrict Us?

This coming Dussehra, be watchful while drawing the list to wish your friends through SMSes. Given the fact that, the Telecom Authority of India (TRAI) from September 27th is limiting the number of texts per day to 100, are halcyon days of text messaging over?

Inexplicably, this latest rules is government's line of attack against spontaneous messages that broke out in recent years. TRAI asked the mobile operators to limit the number of SMSs to 100 per day for each subscriber. This new rule is expected to bang the SMS volume and consequently profit the operators, who can swell the prices to compensate their losses.

Though there are numerous mobile phone users who send more than 100 messages a day, the regulator and government officials are reluctant to buy this. They claim this is the best way to deal with annoying calls that the government and TRAI have been powerless to tackle for years.

Operators are adamant that there will be no major impact on the SMS tariffs due to the ban, but it will be thorny for them given the tight margins that they operate in, which has in recent past lead to increase in prices of call rates and SMSes alike.

"The volumes will definitely take a hit, however it will impact the new players more than the older ones. As SMS revenue are a very small part of the revenue for larger well established players. But then new operators' ability to survive with a price hike is very limited and therefore even they will wait for the larger operators to hike prices," said an executive of a leading telecom operator.

Rajan S Mathew, Director General, Cellular Operator Association of India does not feel there will be a crash on pricing. He said, "All though volumes will definitely take a hit, the cost implication will be very minimal and will not reach the retail subscribers. In fact we have already communicated to the TRAI that this move is not going to be beneficial for anyone in the eco-system as the unscrupulous elements that send out spam massages will end up buying more connection to continue to send these spasm, and only the end consumer will suffer."

Monitoring 3,000 SMSes a month for postpaid subscribers, adhered to or not will be tough for the telecom operators. "In case of prepaid users, you can monitor it on a day-today basis, but for postpaid customers, you will look at the number at the end of the month," said Rajan.

Previously this month, the telecom regulators had made it mandatory for commercial communications to be sent between 9 am and 9 pm to all subscribers whether registered for the "National Do Not Call Registry" or not. On the other hand, you can choose for the facility which allows you to access information on any of the seven segments-banking and financial products, real estate, education, health, consumer goods, automobiles, communication and entertainment, tourism and leisure. An exception will be made in case of transaction-related messages such as those from banks, insurance companies, railways, airlines or telecom service providers for providing information related to customers or passengers.

There are a few things that need to be measured. On a day to day basis very few consumers will comprehend that there is a limit as most users do not send even 50 messages a day.

The brunt will be felt all through the festivals and special occasions when most people send a lot of SMSes to wish their near and dear ones. And the impact on the operators will also be the highest on these days as the discounted rates are not applicable on these days, bringing in a lot of profit. They will not be proficient enough to make much profit on other days, and will be forced to extract profit by either escalating the SMS rates or making the discount vouchers costlier, or plummeting the number of free SMSes that users get with special vouchers.

Students, who have a preference to texting than calling as it is cheaper; individual professionals, who need to stay on clients' radars; or even a housewife sending out party invites will all be affected by the boundary. However, the law is not relevant to transactional messages, such as the balance updates sent by banks and to telemarketers registered with TRAI. Public interest messages or those about natural calamities and charities are also excused within the 160-character limit.

What can help thwart this hike is the fact that the registered telemarketers are still free to send as many massages as they want, but only to people who have opted for promotional SMSes. And since the volumes here are massive it might be able to soak up the crash from the cutback in retail user generated volumes.

But what impact will this regulation have on volumes? Only time will tell!