Does Your Brand Speak ‘Brandsperanto’?
From Nike and Apple to Target and MasterCard, today’s wordless silhouette brands are tapping into a wider trend of universal symbolic communication.
Wordless branding
Illustration: Ben Schott
Clubhouse — the audio app that blitzed to a value of $4 billion, and obsessed media social-media during Covid-19’s dull lockdowns — recently trailed a new branding device: a cupped-hand “C” gesture, designed to “evoke feelings people experience in a Clubhouse room.”
Representing a polyglottal audio brand with a gesticular monogram that wordlessly communicates (and humanizes) multiple brand characteristics is a smart idea. It’s certainly smarter than Clubhouse’s handwave emoji logo. Who knows, it may help fend off a tsunami of competition from Twitter, Spotify, Discord, Facebook, Telegram, Airtime, Lizhi, Stereo, Stationhead and Spoon — to name but a few.