On September 21, billboards in major Canadian cities began asking a question with no obvious asker: “Hu Dis?” The green “Hu” came from Hulu’s logo, and the “Dis” was cut from Disney’s. Each billboard paired the two half-logos with a tight crop of a character or star from a Hulu show, giving the iconic Disney logo a redesign nobody expected.
By October 7, Disney+ Canada claimed the campaign and given the answer: Hulu’s shows now live inside the Disney+ app, according to LBB. Design press reported surprise that Disney would cut up its own mark, along with a positive reaction online.
Disney took a logo most brands would treat as untouchable and cut it in half, and the response from designers and marketers online was praise. Meanwhile, Tree Hut swapped its tree and serif lettering for a bubbly wordmark last December, and many of its fans said it looked cheap.
How much a design changes tells you very little about how customers will react. A logo is the one part of a rebrand every customer sees first, so they read it as a preview of everything behind it, and they react to what they think that preview says they are about to lose.
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A logo redesign tells customers who the brand is for now
When Tree Hut dropped its tree emblem and clean serif lettering for a bubbly, text-only logo, the packaging, website and social channels changed with it. Its chief marketing officer said the goal was to close a gap: shoppers know the sugar scrub in the jar, but not that Tree Hut makes it.
Fans heard something different. Many said the new look seemed made for kids or looked like a cheap knockoff, and one wrote that it was “giving dollar store dupe,” according to Parade. The brand had said the formulas would stay the same, Parade also reported, but that answered a question customers weren’t asking. They were reading a price tier and an audience in a mark that looked younger and cheaper than what they had been buying.
Sézane shows the same pattern from the premium side at a smaller scale. The French fashion brand has built its following on accessible-but-elevated positioning, which Vogue placed above J.Crew or Anthropologie and more approachable than Toteme. Its founder has been moving it slightly upmarket, and announced that August 23 would bring a new visual identity, redesigned stores and a refreshed fall collection.