An Analysis of the Logos of Fortune 500 Companies

Organizations dream of becoming a part of the elite group of companies that make up the Fortune 500, but most companies never hit the mark. So, what is the criteria makes these 500 companies stand out? There are many aspects to running a successful organization, including customer service, leadership, networking, scaling and budgeting. It takes a lot of research to establish a business and get it up and running, much less gain such a high level of success. However, there is one thing which is crucial to starting your company that we were thinking we may be able to learn a thing or two from Fortune 500 companies who are at the top.

That’s exactly why we decided to analyze the logo and branding marketing aspects of these 500 companies to try and uncover any similarities which might be beneficial for a new company just beginning. We dove in and took a deep look a the font types, colors, and imagery of the logos and broke down what we thought were a few key insights.

Logo Colors

When it comes to color, there seems to be a repeating pattern emerging. It seems that many of the logos utilize the color blue. In fact, 51% of the logos analyzed have at least a shade of blue present. Pink, on the other hand is at the other end of the spectrum and doesn’t get much attention for the logos of these Fortune 500 companies.

Most of the time companies are using just two colors and going three colors or more in a logo is rarely practiced. For the companies that do have two colors in their logo, 18% utilize a combination of red and black.

Logo Fonts

The majority of Fortune 500 businesses utilize sans serif font (75%) for their logos and only a very small select few use both serif and sans serif fonts for their company logo (5%). When it comes to capitalization, it definitely looks like the best practice is to either use all capital letters or refer back to the standard capitalization etiquette.

Logo Imagery

Lastly, we analyzed the number of logos that utilize words, images, or a combination of the two and found that it can be very important indeed to use words in your logo, only 2% of all Fortune 500 companies use only an image.

At EPC Group, we have worked on IT related projects with many businesses that are part of the Fortune 500, so as we were conducting our research we grew curious about those companies as well. We split off the 111 companies where we have done work with in the past out of the 500 and drew upon some insights regarding their logos as well. You can see the results below:

Branding will always be a key component to your overall marketing strategy. It helps to increase awareness around your services or products, so naturally it should be one of the first things you analyze seriously as you create your business plan. Perhaps taking some tips on how to go about designing your logo from this analysis of Fortune 500 company logos would be beneficial to your efforts.