my friends regularly confuse your logo with [the German Congstar carrier][1]. I get asked regularly: “Ah, is this a new phone offered by Congstar? I did not know you switched your carrier.”
To illustrate why I can understand them, a side-by-side comparison of my back-cover and the Congstar logo.
I do not know if this is a good or a bad thing. In terms of recall value this is not so good for your brand. Because if I give my phone into the hands of others, even if they do not say aloud “Hey, Congstar.” - nearly 95% thought of this. I tried it out, I asked afterwards
I did not want to stress the fact that a star is not very unique, but that it gets confused with a company that acts in the same field of operation. Even if it was confused with Indiana Jones that is not bad, he does not sell Smart Phones. But Congstar does
The Indiana Jones thing is pretty cool actually! Wasn’t aware of that
I haven’t yet had people confuse my phone with a Congstar branded phone, but I only have it for a week and all my friends knew it was a Fairphone before they saw it. That said, I definitely see the confusion, hell I would probably confuse it with Congstar myself if I wasn’t familiar with Fairphone…
But, I don’t see how this could be changed?
Well… apart from Fairphone making a deal with Congstar, using it to their benefit with a slogan of “Two stars collide”, “The universe in your hand” or something equally cheesy.
Even more so, I guess this could actually be a legal problem for Fairphone. I am sure you have good lawyer, but I don’t know if FP is aware of the problem (given the huge amount of carriers within the EU).
Also, from a branding perspektive I don’t quite get why there are two different logos (the one we talk about and the blue one with the full name)? Why not a single one, wouldn’t that simplify brand reconginition? So as the small logo is so similar to the Congstar one, why not use the full logo, but on the phone it should probably be in grey instead of blue. Actually, it wouldn’t be a problem to print it on the front (large vertical space there) and on the back it would even be beneficial; there is the logo and “Fairphone” written in standard font - In my opinion it would be much easier to print the logo with the name, so you could just combine both.
Being from Germany I’ve heard a lot of people who confuse FP logo with the Congstar Logo so I actually see a problem for the logo. We should ask congstar to change it.
Otherwise, we could try randomly rotating the Logo.
Wow. looks like a diamond now. Noone would ever see similarity to congstar anymore.
Have a nice day!
