3.3 Brand name and logo
The brand name and logo are, of course, also key aspects of the verbal identity (and, in the colour and font of the brand name, you can see how verbal and visual identity overlap). The name and logo both carry this slightly cheeky tone, channelling playfulness and informality by evoking associations with children and childhood. ‘Innocent’ as a word tends to be used to describe children – you can check this in a corpus – while the logo itself looks like something produced by a child and has connotations of being unadulterated. The logo additionally reinforces the sense of fun as it uses a mock halo above a very schematic representation of a face. In addition, the health aspect of the products is emphasised once again in the central image.
Activity 7 Verbal identity globally?
One final point to reflect on: Innocent Drinks has come a long way since its founding. It’s now owned by The Coca-Cola Company and is sold internationally. Can you think of any challenges that this growth trajectory might pose for the company’s verbal identity?
Discussion
There are probably many challenges that the company faces as it grows, but one aspect will be the differences between languages and cultures. The features discussed in the earlier activity as examples of informality, are examples in English, perhaps even only in a particular regional variety of English. Similarly, the associations of individual words will vary from country to country and region to region.
Grammar and corpus linguistics can, of course, be of use in meeting these challenges. You can explore, for example, whether the word ‘innocent’ has the same associations in American as in British English. You can also explore corpora of spoken language in other languages to discern what grammatical features are associated with it and adapt the texts accordingly.