Capital One: When All Else Fails, Bring in the Swoosh
February 2, 2008 by Susan Gunelius
Filed under Marketing
The Brand New blog uncovered the upcoming logo change for Capital One (NYSE: COF) this week, which is due to officially launch this month. With all of the problems in the subprime financial market, Capital One must have been feeling desperate with this redesign because they pulled out the overused and dreaded swoosh graphic.
The only thing that makes this swoosh worse than the million or so logos that have used it before is that this one is done in a gradiant color which anyone with a background in print production knows can be an issue using certain production methods, and those problems usually lead to higher printing costs or use of a non-standard logo (and branding people hate that).
I prefer the blue color, but they’re still not fooling me. Their interest rates are and fees are too high.
What do you think?
Tags: Capital One, Capital One logo, logo design, branding, brand icon
Thanks for giving me an opportunity to share my thoughts. I would like to know why Capital One used the swoosh graphics. What resemblance or message does it convey? Instead of the swoosh graphic, maybe they could have added a tree icon. A tree conveys a lot of positive vibes…
You know if they add the swoosh to the Twin Cities rebranding effort you wrote about, it’ll look great…just kidding.
I’m not sure, but can they legally use the “swoosh” thing? Does Nike have a trademark on it?
I don’t think the swoosh does anything for them. They spend a lot of money on advertising, and I don’t see that this adds anything to their advertising message.
As long as the swoosh isn’t an exact duplicate (or extremely similar) to the Nike swoosh, than another company can use a swoosh graphic in their logo. The problem comes in how overdone the swoosh graphic is. It’s almost as bad as the dreaded globe icon (see my Xerox logo post for more on that tired graphic).
I completely agree that the new Capital One logo does nothing to further their overall brand message. The company tries to be so modern and cutting-edge in its advertising (kind of like the anti-financial company, which I’m sure speaks to their target audience), so I’m surprised they’d go with this outdated logo redesign. It seems completely out of synch with the brand image they try so hard to create.