Buying In - (Page 16) 16 rob walker The first brand logo worn on the outside of a garment is believed to be the Lacoste crocodile: 1920s French tennis star René Lacoste, playing off a nickname given to him by the press, had one embroidered on a jacket he wore and then tennis shirts he designed and sold after retiring. We’ve seen plenty of logos come and go since then, and of course they all start out with no particular meaning. A logo can acquire its meaning from the product it is attached to or the people who use the product—in ads, in the real world, or in the gray area in between, such as pictures of celebrities in magazines. Ecko’s ads, in The Source and Vibe, had high production values and put the rhino on a surprising range of maverick recording artists who were not mainstream stars at the time—Talib Kweli, Beatnuts. Lucian James, whose branding agency, Agenda Inc., did some consulting projects for Ecko, points out that the rhino also referenced the symbol language most familiar to the then emerging youth culture: the language of the Polo pony and the Lacoste crocodile. The language of brands. The rhino both participates in this language and subtly satirizes it. “Rhinos are not exactly aspirational,” James notes. Sales went from $15 million in 1998 to $96 million by 2000, then rocketed to more than $400 million today. “I think it’s like something sublime,” Ecko said to me, speaking about successful logo icons in general. “When something is aesthetically beautiful, people react. And when you can assign a meaning and value to something and summarize or capture all of that instantly, that’s something that I think human nature just gloms on to.” If it’s true that symbolic meaning cannot be invented—that a symbol must tie back to an empirical reality to qualify as authentic and thus be embraced by consumers—then Ecko’s
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