When Twitter Is Cheap And ANZ Isnt

When it comes to your company identity, nothing says more about whom you are and what you stand for than your corporate logo and whilst some companies totally understand this, others prefer to bury their head in the sand and put up with a $2 design.

The trouble is, history says, that isn’t always going to fail and likewise, spending a ton of money on a new logo, might not produce what you are looking for either. We’ve taken a few of the worlds most recognisable brands and examined the success and failure of logo design only using cost as our analysis.

If you havent heard about the Nike swoosh logo, then you have lived on mars for 40 years and wouldnt know that it cost the company just $35, all be it back in 1971 which to be fair, is still a good price. The most famous cheap logo design in recent times could well be Twitter. Logo designer Simon Oxley received as little as $6 in 2009 for his famous bird design that is now synonymous with the micro blogging site through a scheme called crowdsourcing.

when you weigh that up against other company logos, that has to be the best value for money of all time, never mind in the logo world. At the other end of the scale however we find a company willing to spend $400,000 the create the identity of the 2012 Olympic games in London. Yes ok the Olympics are a big thing and deserve a great logo, but $400K for a few years seems poor value for money? At best, it has around 6 years life span, working up towards the games, during and then perhaps a little while after, yet the UK government paid designers Wolff Ollins almost half a million dollars.

That’s nothing compared to what the Arnell group were paid for redesigning the Pepsi logo in 2009, with around $1million changing hands for the tiny update that most people didnt even notice. So Twitter definitely gets the award for best bargain logo but despite Pepsi’s spend, there is one company who win the “most expensive terrible logo” award. Despite spending $1million on an updated logo, Pepsi dont even come close to the extremes ANZ Bank went to when replacing their logo with a worse designin 2009, spending an absurd $15million in the process and clearly take the award for most expensive logo design.