Enough Re-Branding To Give You A Headache

Well, maybe it’s not the amount of re-branding that gives you the headache as much as when a company’s re-branding attempts seem misplaced. You would think that major corporations put plenty of time, effort and lest we forget money into the research and development of their new branding, but examples such as Blimpie’s recent logo change really make me scratch my head. It almost seems like logo change such as this one was done simply to just change it to something new. It reminds me of when I used to rearrange my bedroom when I was younger just because I felt like a change of scenery would be cool. There was no logical or purposeful reason to rearrange the furniture, but I suppose it added some kind of excitement to the room until it eventually wore off in a few days when I was used to it.

As far as an outdated appearance is concerned, I don’t even think that the original logo seems that old looking. Sure, it has been around and unchanged for quite some time so technically one could make the argument that it is outdated, but what they changed it to is no more modern looking than what they already had. Not to mention it gets zero style or originality points from me. When I saw this it near boggled my mind because it is very likely that Blimpie paid a decent amount of money to a reputable designer, only for them to simply choose a font. To be fair, the font that spells out the company name is often the main element in many effective and modern logos, but this one just screams downgrade to me.

The font used in the original logo had additional style applied to it and further interest was created by using a second color to dot the i’s. The font itself on the original logo also seems like more of a calculated decision, as the nature of each character is bubbly and sort of gentle, which goes very well with the most common feelings one gets from the word Blimpie. Aside from being the name of a well known sandwich shop, for many people the word Blimpie instinctively reminds them of an actual blimp, which is what you might describe as bubbly but certainly rounded and smooth looking. That being said, it seems like a curious decision to choose such a bold, firm and rigid font for the new logo design. Neither of them seem to have anything to do with sandwiches unless you consider the yellow dots atop the letter i’s in the old design to be conceptual representations of olives on toothpicks. Even if that wasn’t the intention, it is just hard for me to get behind a logo design that is nothing more than a common font that has no creative elements introduced to it.

Maybe their motivation was to rid their logo of two colors so that they didn’t have to think about how two different colors would look on various promotional products. Although if that were actually the case, they could’ve simply changed the dots above the i’s to green. So despite my best efforts to come up with an acceptable explanation for this logo change, I simply cannot do it. Maybe in time they’ll wind up pulling a Tropicana and restore the old logo, but in the mean time I can’t help but wonder if I have seen a more generic, unoriginal and purposeless logo change than this one.