Why brands that have nothing to do with firearms use rifle imagery to appeal to their clientele — It may be that no company today better personifies America, or perhaps simply ’Merica, than Black Rifle Coffee, which has grown into a multimillion-dollar concern by building a brand centered around a right-wing political stance that is heavy on, as the name would suggest, its reverence for firearms.

The Olympic Games are an exercise in branding — Friday’s Tokyo 2020 Opening Ceremony should serve to remind us that in a fundamental way, the Olympic Games are an exercise in branding. …

USC designed logos for its entire men’s basketball roster, while Texas and Oklahoma produced them for its incoming 2020 football players — As college sports have become increasingly big businesses in the United States, with many coaches’ salaries measured in millions of dollars and television contracts reaching the billions, the NCAA and its member institutions, the universities that field the teams, have had difficulty in continuing to maintain the façade of amateurism…

The Bélo mark has established itself as the most iconic symbol among those of today’s tech unicorns — Logos have become popular topics for public discussion in recent years, thanks in large part to the emergence of social media. And in the past decade, perhaps no logo has generated as much online chatter as Airbnb’s 2014 “Bélo” mark, formed by a simple line tracing a triangle, with a…

It’s not just a 3-digit number but a kind of secret handshake that locals — and consumers in-the-know — can recognize — In a remarkable case of a company tucking its tail between its legs, headwear giant New Era last month apologetically pulled its “Local Market” line of baseball caps from its website after they were subjected to vigorous mockery on social media. The caps were similar to those that New Era…

A deep dive into America’s long, fraught tradition of racist logos — The Black Lives Matter groundswell last year prompted reckonings across many aspects of American business, including branding. The criticism of long-established commercial icons like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben’s, which had been building for decades, finally reached a tipping point. The result was their removal from packaging in overdue recognition…

The new look has already been compared to Goodwill, Photoshop and an elephant — Normally, when a blue-blooded titan of American industry overhauls its iconic logo for the first time in 57 years, as General Motors did on Friday as it announced its new focus on electric vehicles, it creates quite a stir. But it seemed by the end of last week that Americans…

Is the streetwear company that gamified artificial scarcity really worth billions? — The November sale of streetwear icon Supreme to apparel and footwear giant VF Corporation for north of $2 billion raised the question of what exactly was the retail conglomerate getting for its money? To the uninitiated, Supreme’s business model seemed to be based on little more than slapping its familiar…

Why everyone from Goldman Sachs to Netflix is investing in their very own typeface — Apparel retailer Banana Republic found itself in hot water last month, accused in a lawsuit filed by New York typographer Moshik Nadav of unlawfully appropriating the ampersand from his Paris Pro typeface. But the attempt to add some sparkle to the clothing retailer’s brand — after a recent rough patch…