Around 2024, Tesla began phasing out its T logo. Part of this may have been to emphasize the text logo for brand recognition, but recently it seems even that text is disappearing. It feels like the company is moving toward the next stage of its brand design.
Ultimately, the text will vanish, and the shape alone will be enough for people to recognize it. In consumer products, this is the highest-level approach—an ultimate form of branding that only a few winners can achieve.
I’m reminded of a story from the Macintosh era, when Steve Jobs reportedly instructed Apple to reduce the use of the apple logo everywhere. As a result, today anyone can recognize a MacBook or iPhone from its silhouette alone. The form itself has become the brand, to the point where imitators copy it.
A brand, at its core, is a mark—originally a literal brand burn—meant to differentiate. It’s about being efficiently recognized by people, conveying “this is it” without conscious thought. One effective way is to tap into instincts humans have developed through coexistence with nature, subtly hacking the brain’s recognition process. Even Apple and Tesla, which have built inorganic brand images, have incorporated such subconscious triggers into product design and interface development, shaping the value they hold today.
But will this still be effective going forward?
The number of humans is tiny compared to the number of AI and IoT devices. For now, because humans are the ones paying, the market focuses on maximizing value for them. That will remain true to some extent. But perhaps there is a kind of branding that will become more important than human recognition.
Seen in this light, Apple, Tesla, and other Big Tech companies already seem to hold tickets to the next stage. By adopting new communication standards like UWB chips, or shaping products to optimize for optical recognition, they are working to be more efficiently recognized by non-human entities. Even something like Google’s SEO meta tags or Amazon’s shipping boxes fits into this picture.
In the past, unique identification and authentication through internet protocols were either impossible, expensive, or bound to centralized authority. But advances in semiconductors, sensor technology, and cryptography—along with better energy efficiency—are changing that. The physical infrastructure for mesh networks is also in place, and branding is on the verge of entering its next phase.
The essence of branding is differentiation and the creation of added value. The aim is to efficiently imprint recognition in the human brain, often by leveraging universal contexts and metaphors, or by overwriting existing ones through repeated exposure. I’m not a marketing expert, but that’s how I currently understand it.
And if that’s correct, the question becomes: must the target still be humans?
Will humans continue to be the primary decision-makers?
Does it even make sense to compete for differentiation in such a small market?
At this moment, branding to humans still has meaning. But moving beyond that, as Apple products adopt a uniform design and Tesla moves toward minimalistic, abstract forms, branding may evolve toward maximizing value by being efficiently recognized within limited computational resources. Uniformity could make device recognition more efficient and reduce cognitive load for humans as well.
We should design future branding without being bound by the assumption that humans will always be the ones making the decisions.
