15 Famous Company Logos with Hidden Meanings

Sometimes, art is used to influence individuals on a subconscious level. This is a tactic often used in advertising, and embedding subliminal messages have been used in campaigns by Pepsi, to Palmolive. Company logos, however, sometimes tell a cleaner, more honest story. Take a look at a few of the below well-known logos, and see how they came to be.

 

Baskin-Robbins: If you look closely enough, you’ll see that the pink-colored parts of the BR say “31,” coincidentally the number of flavors they are famous for selling.

 

 

Beats: This one is a little more subtle. Beats, a headphone retailer, is a division of Apple, and was founded by Dr. Dre. Their logo looks like a person wearing…well…headphones.

 

BMW: A common misconception on the BMW logo is that the center quadrants represent airplane propeller blades, a shout out to the companies roots in aviation technology. It is actually a part of the Bavarian flag, an area in Germany where the company was founded.

 

Coca Cola: This one is purely a coincidence. The space between the letters “O” and “L” perfectly makes the Danish flag. Coca Cola recognized this happenstance, and used it in several marketing campaigns there.

 

 

Continental: A world-famous producer of automobile tiers has a logo in which the first two letters make an automobile wheel. I bet you never noticed that one.

 

 

Evernote: It’s fairly common knowledge that elephants have terrific memories (Elephants never forget!), however the cool part about Evernote’s logo is how the elephant’s ear is folded over, in a manner similar to how people bookmark pages of a book they are reading.

 

F1: The automobile racing logo makes great use of negative space, as the white are in between the “F” and the red stripes outline the number 1.

 

 

Hyundai: Many think the “H” in Hyundai’s logo is merely for the automobile maker’s name, but the South Korean brand’s logo is actually a visual representation of two people shaking hands (presumably a client, and a company agent).

 

LG: Another South Korean company, LG’s logo is supposed to be a customer’s face, representing the company’s aspirations to maintain excellent human relations with their customers.

 

Toblerone: Now I want chocolate. You probably didn’t notice this one, but there’s a silhouette of a bear hidden in the right mountain peak. This is a shout out to the fact that Bern, Switzerland, the city in which Toblerone is based, is sometimes called the “City of Bears.”

 

Toyota: The current Toyota logo was introduced in 1989, and hints at several things. First, it is a stylized image of a needle with a thread passing through it. This is a callback to the company past, as Toyota used to produce weaving machines. More importantly, though, is that the individual parts of the logo also spell out the company name.

 

Vaio: The famous computer division of SONY has a logo where the first two letters represent an analogue symbol, and the last two letters look like a 1 and 0, or a digital signal.

 

 

Adidas: The brand name, derived from its founder: Adolf Dassler has a logo that has always included three stripes configured such that it looks like a mountain. This uphill battle represents the challenges all sports athletes face and must overcome.

 

Amazon: The famous online retailer has a pretty subtle logo, too. The orange arrow looks like a smile, representing the happy faces of customers who can find everything they want on Amazon…from A to Z, which are coincidentally (or not coincidentally) the letters the “smile” connects.

 

Apple: This famous logo was designed by Rob Yanov, who purportedly spent a whole week drawing apples, trying to come up with a simple way to depict its form and shape. Taking a bite out of the apple was a part of the process, when he suddenly realized that “bite” and “byte” were homonyms, which is why the Apple logo is of an apple with a bite taken out of it.