There’s nothing wrong with upscaling your brand. If you have a product that does better in a more affluent demographic, perhaps upscaling your brand is what you need to do to get the sales you need. The problem comes when brands try to upscale products that are typically sold to a less affluent demographic.
There is nothing wrong with upscaling your brand. If you have a product that does better in a more affluent demographic, perhaps upscaling your brand is what you need to do to get the sales you need. The problem comes when brands try to upscale products that are typically sold to a less affluent demographic. Payless shoes makes a large portion of its sales by selling low priced, affordable shoes to low and middle class families all across America. Yet, despite their target audience they have decided to change their very noticeable, round, and large logo to a trendy sans-serif logo that would make the designers over at Pepsi and Tropicana very, very happy.
Image from: flickr.com/photos/jonrev/2746231846/
Now, the old logo isn’t the best designed piece in the world by any means, the “red dots” are hard to interpret as actual “o’s” and the font choice is reminiscent of a time where having the biggest logo meant the most sales (at least it did in theory.) Yet, despite this logos visual shortcomings, it is highly debatable as to whether or not the new logo does the Payless shoes brand justice. See the picture below:
I have not had the change to walk into a Payless shoes store to see if the shoes have gone up in price, the new logo makes payless look like “Paymore” (Sorry for the terrible pun). The logo is a huge visual improvement. The sans-serif font is aligned perfectly so that the “shoe source” fits optically well inside of the “Payless”. The circular “P” which connects with the “L” forms a sort of yin-yang relationship between the two letters, but the actual image it forms could and will be unrecognizable to consumers are familiar with the Payless brand. I’m curious to find out how sales do for the new branding redesign. I’m sure prices are up after store makeovers around the country and it is likely that show prices will reflect it.
So let me know what you guys think of the logo.
One Response
I am always driving around and never notice the change around the inner cities.
I think the redesign is more for plazas or malls. It looks pretty good, it doesn’t look as ghetto.