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Today, what counts far more than a puma, a monkey, or a snarling aardvark is the cross-sensory experience your brand offers

I'm talking not only the emotion, beliefs, and desires your brand evokes, but its feel, touch, sound, smell and personality, of which the logo is just one small part

Whether it's a soda can, a car, a doll, a fragrance, a smartphone, or laptop, your brand needs to be smashable, e.g., instantly identifiable via its shape, design, copy, contours, and even navigation. Aside from adolescents, who are always on the lookout for the coolest logos to set them apart from, or help them gain traction with, their peers, today for most consumers the logo comes in near-to-last place to other considerations.

Analyst Bob Herbst, who tracks the industry at AirlineFinancials.com, pointed out that "all American Airlines labor groups have taken pay and benefits concessions, including thousands of furloughs and layoffs, so management can—somehow—justify spending tens of millions of dollars to take aircraft out of service and paint them."

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Brand fans might remember how The Gap learned this lesson a little over two years ago when it scrapped a logo that customers had embraced for two decades in favor of a more modern badge that won widespread disapproval—not just because of its appearance, but because consumers couldn’t see the need for it.

"Here was absolutely no reason to change AA’s well-recognized and respected logo," he said. Plus, he added, passengers care more about on-time flights than what color the paint is.

For a logo to hijack our brains and hearts through pre-attentive processing (those things we see in the corner of our eye), we require multiple exposures to the stimulus. Chatterjee has found this unconscious, positive association to occur within 23 exposures, but she believes it could probably happen in even fewer. “When consumers process any stimulus--a logo is a brand stimulus--implicitly it only creates a weak memory trace. The weak memory trace by itself can’t really change behavior, Chatterjee explains. “But over multiple exposures, those weak memory traces start to become stronger.” “The consumer is unaware that those memory traces exist. Let’s take John and Jane Doe looking at an ultrasound. They’re looking at a picture, they’re oohing and ahhing, showing it to their friends, talking about it, putting it in a scrapbook. They’re focusing on the baby. They may not even know it’s an ultrasound made by a GE machine, but they see it multiple times.” “Then, maybe they’re buying a new house, and so they’re buying appliances, they go to a big-box store, they’re looking at multiple brands. It is quite conceivable they will be more attracted to the GE brands."

for this long con to work, the logo has to be identical everywhere I see it.

The other catch, maybe the most important catch of all when working in unconscious branding, is that the consumer can’t recognize they’re being manipulated, or very bad things happen.

American Airlines has just rebranded for the first time in over 40 years. The AA logo of yore is gone, replaced by the Flight Symbol, a red and blue eagle crossed with a wing. And every plane will be tagged with a high-velocity abstraction of the American flag on its tail. There’s logic behind the decision: AA recently ordered 550 new planes. Many will have composite bodies that can’t be polished with the mirror shine of American’s existing fleet.

In approaching the redesign, American polled both their own employees about what defines the American brand (the answers were predominantly the planes’ silver fuselage and the eagle logo) and the larger globe about the American country (which is where tech, entertainment, and progress come in). What they were looking for was, not just what is American Airlines, but what is America in the age of globalization?

Futurebrand’s research also found that the American flag, of course, was another defining trait of America itself. The challenge was, how does American portray America without becoming blindly patriotic in the global market? The solution was a striped abstraction of our flag, augmented into a high-velocity graphic printed on each plane’s tail to make aircraft seem like they’re flying, even when they’re sitting still. In other words, they ditched the stars in favor of the stripes.

According to Anholt, a country has a good and strong brand image if people in other countries feel happy that it exists. If people know that Bulgaria exists but are not grateful that it exists, then something needs to be done.

“There are at least 25 things that excite people all over the world such as poverty, climate change, education, women’s rights, children, crime, terrorism,” said Anholt, adding that the country can choose one of these things, focus on it, to try to change it, thus making itself important for the rest of the world. As an example, he mentioned South Korea’s nation branding efforts, which include improving its image by spending more money on international financial assistance for poor countries.

“This is real politics, real innovation, not something dreamed up by PR agencies,” said Anholt. He warned that inventing a logo or slogan in order to advertise Bulgaria will not be enough and that it will not change people’s perceptions across the world about Bulgaria.