All in the Family

Okay so Dean and I may have been the last ones to notice this but when we were at a Toyota/Lexus/Scion event this weekend at the House of Blues in New Orleans we observed an impressive feat of branding. Or, rather, inter-brand branding. As we sat back and enjoyed the mixture of great music and food, we looked up on the closed-circuit TV screens and noticed that the loop they had running featured the Toyota, Lexus, and Scion logos flipping between each other. This loop offered a seamless horizontal flip from one logo to the next and that's when we both saw it — all three of these very different logos are all based on the same basic oval shape (look at the outlines above). The result? When they run together they seem like logical parts of a machine that contribute to a total brand picture and yet 99% of the time — when viewed on their own — all retain the unique characteristics of their brand (they also make up the letters of their brand name — T, L, & S). Way to keep it all in the family, Toyota.

Probably the best remark someone shared with me on this front was the casual yet insightful observation that this kind of total brand synergy is not all that common and couldn't be achieved if you set all of the GM logos up next to one another ...