Will a new logo distract from Wal-Mart’s image problems?

News broke this weekend that Wal-Mart plans to change its logo - and its name. The retailer will shift away from its current hyphenated, blue logo with a star to a burnt orange, one-word logotype reading simply “Walmart.” The retailer is planning to announce the change later this week.

Wal-Mart has been trying to update its image for several years, but the change the company really needs isn’t cosmetic. New logos and marketing gimmicks can’t mask the company’s low wages and poor health benefits. What would be even more innovative than a new logo? Changes to the company’s business model that would improve treatment of employees, communities and the environment.

Wal-Mart Plans New Logo to Update Image [Wall Street Journal]

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is about to change one of the most familiar logos in corporate America.

Part of Wal-Mart’s continuing effort to update its once-dowdy image, the new logo for signs and building facades includes white letters on a burnt-orange background followed by a white starburst, according to an artist’s rendering that the company filed recently with planning officials in Memphis, Tenn.

In a change, the name will appear as one word: Walmart. When the company first started in 1962, the name was hyphenated by a dash. But in the past decade, the dash has been replaced by a star on stores and the corporate letterhead.

Initially, the store logo included white letters on a brown brick exterior. About 20 years ago, Wal-Mart moved to a sign that affixed white letters onto a battleship blue/gray background, bordered by red strips.

Wal-Mart hasn’t officially unveiled the new design, and the company didn’t return repeated calls for comment.

The new white-and-orange logo came to light when it was used for a new store prototype proposed last week for a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Shelby County outside Memphis.

Chip Saliba, a manager with the Memphis/Shelby County office of planning and development, said engineers for the company told him that this was the new sign package that the company is unveiling soon. Casey Wilder, an engineer at Carlson Consulting Engineers Inc. in Bartlett, Tenn., confirmed the conversation.

“They have had the most dull, boring signs for 30 years,” Mr. Saliba said. “The new one is kind of funky looking, but I like it,” he added.

Dennis Alpert, senior manager of public affairs and government relations for Wal-Mart in Tennessee, referred calls to Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. But the Memphis Business Journal reported Thursday that Mr. Alpert said Wal-Mart’s new corporate logo would be officially unveiled this coming week.

On the bottom of graphics accompanying the Wal-Mart application, the corporate logo is written in blue letters followed by an orange starburst.

The store signs on Wal-Mart’s approximately 3,600 existing U.S. stores won’t be taken down wholesale, but they will be changed over time, says a person close to the company.

Wal-Mart’s new starburst logo mimics the cleaner, brighter sign of competitor Target Corp., with its iconic red-and-white bull’s-eye.

Wal-Mart has attempted in several ways to update its image in recent years. Gone from almost all its signage is the once-ubiquitous yellow smiley face.

Last year, Wal-Mart also changed its corporate uniform for store workers, retiring bulky blue polyester vests in favor of khakis and polo shirts similar to those favored by Target and other retail chains.

In the past decade, as Wal-Mart ramped up store growth and moved from rural areas into suburban and urban markets, it encountered increasing opposition from neighborhood groups and city planners who objected to what they contended was the uniformly ugly look and size of the stores, which averaged about 200,000 square feet.

In recent years, Wal-Mart has tried to assuage neighborhood groups, making concessions on size and offering facades that better blend into the surrounding neighborhoods, from timber gables in Colorado to pastel stucco in Florida.

Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Monday, June 30, 2008

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