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First up: MasterCard Gets Its First New Logo in 20 Years, courtesy of fastcodesign.com. This article has a few nice quotes from both MasterCard and the design team that provide insight into the thinking behind the new logo. According to MasterCard, the logo was “stuck in the 90s” and the design goals were to simplify and clarify. What’s probably most interesting is a chart showing the logo evolution over the last 50 years. The new logo looks remarkably close the the logo from 1968. There are probably a couple of things happening here. First, the design team did a nice job of focusing on the core visual equities that MasterCard has owned over the years. And second, if you wait long enough, design and style always comes back around.
“There was a lot of screw tightening and design tinkering happening [with the logo] in the first 30 years of the company. Then they almost got frozen in 1996. If you have a MasterCard in your wallet, that’s the logo you see. . . . The trick then is, how do we leverage 50 years of equity with enough TLC to provide a new system?” read more at fastcodesign.com
“There was a lot of screw tightening and design tinkering happening [with the logo] in the first 30 years of the company. Then they almost got frozen in 1996. If you have a MasterCard in your wallet, that’s the logo you see. . . . The trick then is, how do we leverage 50 years of equity with enough TLC to provide a new system?” Second up: 6 Types of Stories Scientifically Proven to Make You Emotional, courtesy of bigthink.com. There’s a wide array of sources that have attempted to map out general story patterns in popular works. But, the team at University of Vermont’s Computational Story Laboratory went one step further. They looked at over 1,700 of the most popular stories, codified and analyzed patterns using data mining tactics, and were able to compute 6 distinct emotional arcs among the stories. Graphs are included for all 6 arcs, and a more thorough breakdown of a Harry Potter story is also included as an example.
You may be wondering which arcs are the most popular. Well, there are two that rise to the top, although they may not be what you expect. They happen to be one-way arcs where there is either a constant rise for the entire story (“rags to riches”), or a constant fall for the entire story (“tragedy” or “riches to rags”). These have very strong emotional impact. So, how might these be applied to your work as a marketer? What stories do you have to tell? How might you evolve the stories you’ve been telling recently?
The two most popular are stories that have one-way trajectories. MIT’s Technology Review describes them as “a steady, ongoing rise in emotional valence, as in a rags-to-riches story such as Alice’s Adventures Underground by Lewis Carroll [and] a steady ongoing fall in emotional valence, as in a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet.” Last but not least, HubSpot put together this useful post: 75 Marketing & Business Acronyms & Abbreviations Every Industry Pro Should Know. It’s pretty self-explanatory and what you’d expect. But that doesn’t stop it from being very useful. There are so many acronyms that fly around in business and on the web, particularly with the rise of new forms of digital measurement and advertising. It’s worth at least a skim through by every marketer out there.
Have you ever heard an acronym but you didn’t know what it meant? It can really throw you off your game in a conversation. I usually try to write it down discreetly or, if I have a laptop, look it up online without anyone seeing. But industry-specific acronyms can have multiple meanings, and sometimes Wikipedia doesn’t do them justice. Those are a few of the popular and trending pieces in the news related to marketing strategy. They caught my attention and hopefully they are useful to you.
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Images from fastcodesign.com, bigthink.com, hubspot.com.
Kevin Namaky is CEO at the Gurulocity Brand Management Institute, a marketing education company that trains and consults for notable brand teams including Kimberly-Clark, Scotts Miracle-Gro, Bolthouse Farms and Gorilla Brands. Kevin is a featured instructor for the American Marketing Association, lectures at the IU Kelley School of business, and has been featured in Ad Age, Forbes, Fast Company and the CMO Council. Previously Kevin worked for 20 years in the corporate and agency world growing notable brands. Follow/connect with Kevin on LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter.