The Softer New Blue Hue Of The Walmart Logo Establishes Trust
Walmart is one of the biggest retailers in the world today. It’s a leader in the industry, worth billions in the market. It’s had a long history of successful sales, but in the early 2000s, there was a bit of a hiccup.
The brand saw falling sales and lacking consumer perceptions, which meant a rebrand was definitely in order. Walmart turned to design agency Lippincott to help give the brand a new, modern edge. And the results were extraordinary.
In particular, the logo design breathed life into the brand in a way Walmart had never experienced before. It’s been a part of the brand’s identity for a decade now — and it’s still going strong.
Lippincott kept the color blue and swapped it for a brighter hue in the new logo. This translated to modernity and trustworthiness.
Instead of the dark, brooding and ominous blue of the past design, the new logo has a freshness and a lightness to it that comes from the baby blue hue. It’s immediately inviting, pulling you in and keeping you enchanted with its lively and effervescent nature.
Most importantly, of course, this blue color gives the brand an authority and an edge. It makes Walmart appear like a brand that you can trust, a brand that you want to trust and want to have on your side. You want to shop here because you know that the brand means business and you’ll leave having had a pleasant and engaging experience.
This blue color is much sleeker and sophisticated — bringing the brand effectively into the 21st century and shedding all of the old, bad and burdensome perceptions of the past.
And consumers felt the change, responding positively to it.
Simple Typography Brings An Approachability To The Brand
It wasn’t just an exciting, new color change that brought a new personality to the Walmart brand. A change in typography also helped to give the retailer a sleek edge.
The typeface is a lush blue Myriad Pro. It’s simple, easy to read and conveys warmth. It’s perfect for the Walmart brand and conveys a humanistic feel. The blue color signifies family friendliness, strength, unity, and a therapeutic tone that puts the mind at ease.
This is a major shift from the previous logo, which was made up of harsh, brash and strict pointed lines and edges. It was entirely corporate, ugly and unpleasant. And it made consumers feel uneasy.
It left them with a bad taste in their mouths, looking at the brand more like an entity than a team of helpful individuals.
But with the new, more fluid and organic typeface, the Walmart brand gets a laid back, relaxed and inviting facelift that instantly puts consumers at ease and makes them feel like they can interact with the Walmart brand and trust that the products they get are worthwhile.
A typeface can have a major impact on a logo as you can see here, and you can have the same impact on your logo by giving your font a refresh.
A Clever Star-Like Symbol Signifies The Brand’s Poignant Past
The Walmart logo has always consisted of a wordmark and a star. But in past iterations, that star sat in between the letters, taking on the shape of a very big, bold and straightforward star form.
But in this new logo, the star also got its own redesign. It’s no longer a basic star shape, created in a bold and clinical white coloring.
Now the star is created in the form of a spark — a bright, yellow spark of creativity and inspiration that sits at the end of the wordmark.
Now we have a yellow spark that sits beside the Walmart word and is slightly bigger than the text. The spark is a symbol of the spark of inspiration that Sam Walton had when he opened his first store.
Just like the spark that goes off in your head when we are hit with an epiphany or discover something amazing — that’s what this poignant symbol represents. This is also a metaphor for Walmart shoppers making intelligent buying decisions with Walmart’s high quality, low-cost items.
It also represents the continued inspiration and new ideas that helped Walmart become the largest retail chain on earth. Yellow represents brightness, inspiration and positivity.
It instills a happiness and joy. It fosters a sense of community, welcoming and confidence that consumers can have with the brand. And the intuitive nature of the shape of the star itself lets consumers use their imagination to create their own adventure within, taking advantage of all that Walmart has to offer them.
This new logo effectively shapes Walmart and its new identity, putting the brand on a path to e-commerce success.
The Success Of Walmart’s Logo & Brand Redesign
Founded by Sam Walton in 1950, Walmart is a retail and wholesale leviathan with a market cap of $221.1 billion and 2.1 million employees. They are known as the king of retail and are one of the most successful chain stores in the world.
But before 2008, their visual identity — in the form of their logo — was a horrifyingly bold and brash design that left consumers feeling a coldness and a lack of authority from the brand.
The prior design featured all caps and an unappealing dark blue. It gave off a very cold impression. It was too stoic, too angular and too unfeeling. This combination and cold vibe gave critics the further fuel they needed to deem Walmart as a soul-crushing small business destroyer.
It screamed “corporation.”
But in the early 2000s, the corporate entity decided to shake things up, hoping to appeal to more audiences and change previous perceptions of the brand. And in 2005 Walmart hired Lippincott to reimagine its brand identity with a new and updated logo.
According to the agency:
The Walmart transformation began with a strategic exploration around its near-term ambitions: to position itself for growth into new markets and customer segments while staying true to their commitment to always carry the lowest prices. We maintained this emphasis on savings, but expanded the brand essence to resonate on a deeper, more emotional level. We looked to the most important outcomes of saving money: feeling smart for making the right choice, spending more time with family, and, to simply live better. We worked with Walmart to deliver this emotionally driven brand promise to their core customer base as well as a new broader audience. Today, this promise shines through in the way employees approach their role in their customers’ lives and Walmart’s contemporized look and feel.
It took three years, but the brand came out of the redesign with a whole new identity and logo to match. This gave the brand a new persona immediately that quickly led to tangible, trackable results.
Walmart debuted the new logo and brand identity in 2008. Thanks to Lippincott’s assistance and guidance, Walmart grew traffic by 7 percent from customers with incomes higher than $75,000.
But it’s not just the traffic and sales that grew. Customer perceptions transformed as well.
Between 2008 and 2010, consumer ratings for how fast, friendly, and clean Walmart was raised exponentially.
Walmart wanted to change its image and reflect the positive vision for the future of its customers and employees. And the end result was a logo change that was simple, kept tradition and conveyed a feeling of friendliness that thwarted further negative perceptions of the brand.
This led to a brighter, friendlier, and more modern store and shopping experience.
What Makes The Walmart Logo Redesign So Successful
With a new redesign, the Walmart brand got a whole new facelift. Not only did it get a new visual identity in the form of a logo, but it got an entirely new persona that helped change consumer perceptions and drive sales in-store and online.
One of the key aspects of the new branding comes in the form of a creative and captivating logo redesign.
The previous Walmart logo was a stoic, cold and lacking design that gave the Walmart brand a corporate edge. It made consumers turn away, feel a sense of distrust and look at the brand as a negative influence.
But the new logo brings with it a liveliness and a fascination that turns heads and fosters a positivity that infects all consumers that interact with it.
The new logo gets a softer and smoother typography created in a light and airy baby blue coloring. A star sits as a spark of inspiration at the end of the wordmark to encourage creativity, enlightenment and that spark that starts it all.
This new logo is more friendly. It’s an approachable symbol that makes the brand itself more welcoming and open for all consumers.
It also establishes a trustworthiness and a modernity. Walmart is a corporate entity, yes. But it’s also one that brands feel they can trust — they can feel that Walmart cares about them and wants to make sure they have access to everything they possibly can.
And it led to traffic and sales that established the brand as a leader in the market for years to come.
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