In The New York Times Mazine: Tide

CLEAN LOOK
How a mass brand’s iconic design fares in a niche-ified world.

In Consumed this week, a look at a brand icon: Tide. The orange-and-yellow circles of its logo have that rare instant-read power that suggests not just Tide but branding in general. But while once there was a thing called Tide, today there are 39 different kinds of Tide. (Not counting Tide To Go, which will be the subject of the brand’s first-ever Super Bowl ad this weekend.)

While this responds to consumer demand for variety, it brings certain challenges to the iconic power that is one of Tide’s marketplace strengths: namely, balancing that recognizable design with the idea of a range of choices.

To assess the Tide logo in the contemporary marketplace, I consulted J. Duncan Berry of Applied Iconology. Berry has a Ph.D. in art history from Brown and for a time taught there and at the Rhode Island School of Design, but these days his specialty is semiotic analysis of package design for consumer-product companies.

Read the column in The New York Times Magazine, or here.

The brand-new Consumed Facebook page is here.