THE VISUAL ASYMMETRY EFFECT: AN INTERPLAY OF LOGO DESIGN AND BRAND PERSONALITY ON BRAND EQUITY

Abstract

Five studies utilizing a variety of experimental approaches and secondary datasets show that a visual property present in all brand logos—the degree of symmetry/asymmetry—can interact with brand personality to impact brand equity. Specifically, compared to symmetrical logos, asymmetrical logos tend to be more arousing, leading to increased perceptions of excitement. As such, consumers tend to perceive asymmetrical logos as more congruent with brands that possess an exciting personality. This can boost consumers' evaluations and the market's financial valuations of such brands, a phenomenon referred to as the visual asymmetry effect. The studies also show that this interplay between brand personality and logo design only occurs for the personality of excitement and the visual property of asymmetry. These findings add to theories of visual design and branding, as well as offer actionable insights to marketing practitioners.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.