Benjamin Button Effect: the figure of elderly in the identity representation of contemporary brands

Abstract

Besides identifying and differentiating goods and services, contemporary brands are able to establish affective links with stakeholders. In the visual realm, brands manifest their identity through a myriad of expressive elements, among them the nominative (logotype) and the symbolic (symbol, color and graphic) visual identifiers. In this article, we examine four popular brands, with decades of existence, that use the figure of an elderly as the symbolic element of identity, which has been through successive redesigns in order to rejuvenate the brand image - a process that can be termed as Benjamin Button effect (BB effect).