What makes a good logo?

Summary

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Nudge Podcast Episode Summary

Episode: What Makes a Good Logo?

Host: Phill Agnew
Guests: Pete Miller (Designer, Octopus Energy), Dr. Aaron Ahuvia (Brand Psychology Expert)
Date: May 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the psychology of logos: what makes some logos more memorable and effective than others. Phill Agnew, the host, delves into two core psychological principles that influence the impact of a logo—distinctiveness (the Von Restorff effect) and anthropomorphism (giving a logo human-like qualities). Drawing on insights from behavioral science, Phill is joined by Pete Miller, designer and first employee at Octopus Energy (the UK’s fastest-growing energy company), and Dr. Aaron Ahuvia, an expert in brand love and consumer psychology.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The UK Energy Market & Octopus Energy’s Growth

• Phill highlights Octopus Energy’s meteoric success, outpacing competitors in revenue and customer acquisition rates.
  • "Octopus Energy has achieved something that no other British startup... can really match." (00:57)
• The industry was dominated by the “Big Six” energy firms, all of whom used very similar, flame-themed, blue or green logos.
  • "It's blue or it's green and it's a flame or it's a spark." – Pete Miller (05:15)

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2. Principle 1: Distinctiveness and the Von Restorff Effect

• Octopus Energy's Logo:
  • Bright hot pink, cartoon octopus with rounded features, above the brand name in clean type.
  • Strikingly different from competitors who used predictable, interchangeable symbols.
    • "Octopus created a logo that was visually distinct... that allowed Octopus to benefit from the von Restorff effect." (05:21)
• Von Restorff Effect (Isolation Effect):
  • People remember distinctive items over similar ones.
    • Phill recounts original experiments by Hedwig von Restorff and recent replications by Richard Shotton:
      • Lists with one distinct item are recalled far more often (06:03–07:07).
      • "Respondents were 30 times more likely to remember the distinctive number." (06:52)
      • "People are four times more likely to mention the fast food brand than the average car brand." (07:19)
  • This carries to brands: visual distinction not only breeds memorability, but can also signal higher perceived quality.
    • "When the logo was distinct... consumers thought that the beer was 5% better quality." (08:34)
• Practical Outcome:
  • Octopus’ bold, outlier logo made a dry, commoditized product memorable and even desirable.

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3. Principle 2: Anthropomorphism—Making Logos Feel Human

• Why an Octopus?

  • Origin was not strategic: the founding investor was called Octopus Investments, and initially advised against depicting an octopus.
    • "One of the first rules... was you can't use an actual octopus... they're weird animals, right?" – Pete Miller (10:19)
  • The team experimented—learning to "dial down the alienness" and make the octopus character cute and welcoming.
    • "There's a really important element in this anthropomorphism... dialing up the friendliness." – Pete Miller (11:53)

• The Psychology of Human-like Logos:

  • Phill and Dr. Aaron Ahuvia discuss why brands use mascots and faces, referencing Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders, Tony the Tiger, M&Ms, Starbucks, Pringles, and more (12:04–13:18).
  • Anthropomorphic Thinking:
    • People instinctively attribute human qualities to objects or brands—making them emotionally relatable.
      • "Anthropomorphism is the situation in which we look at an object and...start thinking about it as if it was a person." – Aaron Ahuvia (13:57)
    • Experimental evidence:
      • People are reluctant to turn off a robot cat that pleads for its life (14:32–16:36).
      • People eat more cookies if they have a face, sometimes even attributing intent to the cookie (16:36).
        • "Mr. Cookie wanted me to eat him..." – Aaron Ahuvia recounts (17:40)
  • Marketing Takeaways:
    • Human features make brands more likable and foster relationships.
      • "If an object unconsciously gets classified as a person, people generally like it more." – Aaron Ahuvia (17:58)
    • Caution: if the product disappoints, anthropomorphism can result in stronger negative reactions (18:35).
      • "If you anthropomorphize... when it doesn't do what you want... it's being a jerk." – Aaron Ahuvia (19:27)

• Constantine, the Octopus Mascot:

  • Through trial and error, Octopus Energy arrived at "Constantine": bright pink, big eyes, small tentacles, smile—maximizing trust and cuteness.
    • "You make an octopus much more trustworthy by making the tentacles small and the eyes big." – Pete Miller (20:12)
  • Eye-tracking research showed dramatic attention spikes when the mascot appeared in outdoor advertising.
    • "You could see a red hot spot on those heat maps of where everybody's eyes are drawn to." – Pete Miller (21:03)
  • The logo also acts as a mascot, performing playful or reassuring actions in various contexts—a dual role not common in utility branding.
    • "We are often playing with this tension of building a brand that's instantly recognizable... with a mascot that's lovable and engaging and interesting." – Pete Miller (21:36)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the sameness of energy company logos:
  • "It's blue or it's green and it's a flame or it's a spark." – Pete Miller (05:15)
• On distinctiveness:
  • "Being distinctive makes brands memorable. It might sound like an obvious point, but it is one that is studiously ignored by those in the advertising industry." – Phill Agnew paraphrasing Richard Shotton (07:38)
• On anthropomorphism:
  • "Anthropomorphism is the situation in which we look at an object and for whatever reason, we start thinking about it as if it was a person." – Aaron Ahuvia (13:57)
• On the risk of highly human brands:
  • "If you anthropomorphize ... you can actually have a much stronger negative response to it than you would if it was just some inert object." – Aaron Ahuvia (19:38)
• Constantine's winning formula:
  • "You make an octopus much more trustworthy by making the tentacles small and the eyes big. But that's taken a lot of iteration." – Pete Miller (20:12)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Octopus Energy’s Industry Context: 00:57–03:01
• Logo Distinctiveness & Von Restorff Effect: 05:12–09:36
• Origin story of the Octopus Logo: 10:19–12:04
• Anthropomorphism in Branding: 12:04–14:32
• Experiments: Robot Cat & Cookie Faces: 14:32–17:53
• Risks of Anthropomorphic Brands: 17:58–19:38
• Constantine: Iteration and Attention: 20:03–21:22
• Logo vs. Mascot Dual Role: 21:22–22:11

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Practical Takeaways

• Stand out in your comparison set:
  • Don’t just be different for the sake of it—be distinct within your industry’s visual “sea of sameness.”
• Humanize your brand—carefully:
  • Faces, mascots, and human cues can make your brand more memorable, friendly, and liked—but also increase the risk of emotional backlash if things go wrong.
• Iterate to find the “right” mascot:
  • Details like eyes, tentacles, or smiles matter enormously for establishing trust and attention.

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Final Thoughts

In summary, a “good” logo isn’t just about color, shape, or style. The most powerful logos draw upon well-established psychological principles: be truly distinct where it matters, and when anthropomorphizing, lean into features that foster likability and recognition. Octopus Energy’s “Constantine” is a compelling demonstration—turning a utility logo into a beloved brand asset through behavioral science and smart iteration.

To find out more about how Octopus Energy applies behavioral science beyond its logo, listen to next week’s episode.

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Transcript

[Phil Agnew]

What makes a good logo? Well, I'm going to warn you straight away that this episode, it will not give you a conclusive answer about what makes a good logo. It is impossible to list all the things that might make a logo better or worse. And I'm not a designer anyway. So instead I'm going to focus on two psychological principles that seem to make logos better. To do so, I've interviewed someone who designed arguably the most successful new British logo in the past 10 years.

[Pete Miller]

Hello, nudge listeners. I'm Pete Miller. I am a designer and I am the very first employee at Octopus Energy. So I have spent the last 10 years or so on my job, which is to create a brand that is trustworthy, lovable and engaging in an industry where those qualities are relatively scarce.

[Phil Agnew]

Set up in August 2015, Octopus Energy has grown rapidly. In 2018, it had 200,000 customers. In 2019, just one year later, they had 1 million. Revenues jumped from 500 million to 1.2 billion in just 2020. By 2024, Octopus Energy reached 12 billion pounds in revenue and had 13 million customers. And it has become the largest supplier in the UK energy space, all within a decade of launching, Octopus Energy has achieved something that no other British startup, including Revolut, Deliveroo or Monzo, can really match. They've accumulated 12 billion pounds in annual revenue within a decade of founding the company, making it the highest revenue startup Britain has produced in a generation.

[Pete Miller]

Ten years ago, the energy industry in Britain was dominated by a few very big players and had been that way for decades.

[Phil Agnew]

Specifically, there were six big energy players. British Gas, Aeon, SSE, EDF, Scottish Power and MPower. Together, these six players had over 90% of the market share.

[Pete Miller]

And yet, despite the majority of households being with these kind of big players, there was real dissatisfaction. Service levels were low, NPS scores were all hugely negative. And. And there was a general feeling of customers being overcharged for something that where they weren't getting acceptable levels of service. Good afternoon, I'm Roger Finn with the latest news from the South. The storm over, the big increase in gas prices heated up today. Some British gas customers in the south, already facing a 35% price hike, say they've now been asked to increase direct debit payments by over 100%. And so our view from day one was to go in and try and create something that was very different, fundamentally worked really well for a big group of customers, but also was kind of like engaging in a way that energy supplies really, really worked.

[Phil Agnew]

Octopus Energy did many things to win over this market. And one small part of that was their logo. Today on Nudge with Pete Miller and Dr. Aaron Ahoovier, we'll break down two principles that make for a good logo. All of that coming up. When someone asks AI for a solution, a product, a service like yours, does your business come up? Does AI suggest you? Well, most companies have no idea and by the time they find out, they've already lost a deal or the sale to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click and before the first form is filled out. That's the moment HubSpot A E O is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Hello, you are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. Today's guest on Nudge is Pete Miller. He helped design the Octopus Energy logo. It's quite a simple logo and yet I think it's quite memorable. It features a pink cartoon like rounded octopus with short curling tentacles sitting above the words Octopus Energy. The color scheme is bold hot pink and it is quite different from the other Big six logos.

[Pete Miller]

What you see in the Octopus Energy brand today is actually something that is, it feels a little bit spontaneous, it feels very human and it feels very, very different to what is kind of traditionally seen as kind of branding and marketing in the energy industry. And it's been quite good fun to explore that over the last 10 years.

[Phil Agnew]

The octopus Energy logo is very different from their original competitors. Take British gas that has a blue and green flame symbol, edf. Red and orange flames surrounding the letters eon, just a red stylized font on a white background. Scottish Power, green and blue flames. Again, OVO Energy kind of different. A clean green Square and then mPower, just a simple red lowercase wordmark. Red, blues, greens, vaguely, all looking like a flame. All of these logos are fairly interchangeable.

[Pete Miller]

No, that's basically it.

[Aaron Ahuvia]

That's basically it.

[Pete Miller]

It's blue or it's green and it's a flame or it's a spark.

[Phil Agnew]

Octopus created a logo that was visually distinct from its direct competitors. Now, a hot pink logo with a cute animal is not totally distinct. Just look at the hello Kitty logo, for example. But it was distinct within the utilities market and that allowed Octopus to benefit from the von Restorff effect. Now, for those loyal listeners of Nudge, I will apologize because you will have heard me talk about this a lot before, but it is relevant here. So I'm going to talk about it again. In 1933, German researcher Hedwig von Restorff published a paper on memory and distinctiveness. She gave her participants long lists of letter combinations to remember. Combinations like J, TSW or PLST or MyQW. It's kind of hard to remember lots of these different combos. Participants had to remember as many as possible. However, included within that list of random letters was one single combination of numbers. 9, 1, 2, 5. Participants were told to remember all of the elements, as many as they could, and then went away, did another task, came back and were asked, what do you remember? Turns out the distinct item. The random combination of numbers were more memorable than any combination of letters. Now you might say, Phil. That is because the numbers are inherently more memorable than letters. After all, our PIN number is digits, for example. Well, no, because von Restorff repeated the experiment, this time with dozens of combinations of numbers and the participants only needed to remember one combination of letters. Now the letters were far more memorable. For his 2017 book, the Choice Factory, Richard Shotton repeated this experiment with his colleague Laura Weston. They gave 500 people who were naturally represented, representative of the UK a list of numbers, 15 written in black and one in blue. A short time later, Shotton and Weston asked which of the numbers they could recall. And the respondents were 30 times more likely to remember the distinctive number. They repeated the experiment with brands. Respondents saw a list of logos, 11 car brands and one fast food brand, so Hyundai, Honda, Toyota and then Burger King included within that. Again, after a pause, Shotton and Weston asked which of the brands the participants could recall. And people are four times more likely to mention the fast food brand than the average car brand. Shotton writes that being distinctive makes brands memorable. It might sound like an obvious point, but it is one that is studiously ignored by those in the advertising industry. All of the UK energy firms had very similar logos. Octopus came up with something unique and that made it more memorable. But that's not all. The distinctive logo may have additional benefits. In 2020, Richard Shotton ran a study with Duncan Willett and Sumaran Karl from News Youth uk. They showed participants four bottles of craft beer. Three of the labels on the craft beer were designed in broadly the same colourful style, whereas the final beer had a markedly different style, just black and white. In other words, there were three quite similar looking beers, although they were from different brands, and then one distinctive looking beer. Participants then had to rate the quality of the four beers to compare the results. Schotten showed another group of participants four more beer logos. Here, the previous visually distinct logo which was black and white blended in as there were now two other black and white logo styles. So out of the four three were black and white logos and the colourful logo this time was the odd one out. Turns out when the logo was distinct compared to its competitors. So colorful compared to black and white or black and white compared to colorful, whatever the logo was, assuming it was distinct compared to the competitors, the consumers thought that the beer was 5% better quality when the logo was distinct. This was a small effect, but in a huge market it could have a major impact. Octopus not only stand out in consumers minds, but by standing out they might appear better quality. But that's not all. There's arguably a more important reason why octopus logo succeeds and it's probably down to its big eyes and small tentacles. Find out why after the break. The podcast I'd like to recommend today after you listen to Nudge is Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings and is brought to you of course by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Listen and you will hear Sarah ask the hard questions and uncover these triumphs, failures and lessons from the top business leaders. Also, you can make your own billion dollar moves in venture business and life. It's a wonderful podcast. So go and listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. Octopus Energy stand out with their distinctive logo, but how did they end up with an octopus as their logo in the first place? I asked Pete.

[Pete Miller]

The octopus is actually a very mundane reason, despite being one of our most distinctive assets. Our very first investor was a company called Octopus Investments. They've got a great history of backing startups in Britain, but they were really interested in renewable energy because they'd invested in a lot of renewable energy generation. And so creating an energy supply supplier was a really interesting proposition for them and they were very keen that we kind of carry their name from early doors, but that initially came with some quite interesting limitations, shall we say? So one of the first things that we encountered was they had created a brand. We were nothing. We were a startup trying to find our way in energy. And one of the first rules that we heard was you can't use an actual octopus in any of your marketing materials because they're weird animals, right? They have tentacles, they're very alien. If you tried to picture an alien, it would probably be something quite close to an octopus and that freaks people out. So instead you can use the name, you can Maybe stick in a tentacle here or there, but you definitely don't use an actual octopus. It's fair to say we ignored that feed that suggestion from very early days and actually started experimenting with lots of different octopuses. There was lots of octopuses, big ones, small ones, ones with strangely sized foreheads, ones with super long tentacles that were trying to do lots of different things. But I began to realize over time that there's a really important element in this anthropomorphism which is actually really dialing down the alien ness of a character and really dialing up the friendliness.

[Phil Agnew]

That friendliness was giving the logo cute human like features. And giving a brand human features is extremely common. You have Ronald McDonald, the clown mascot of McDonald's. You have Colonel Sanders, the deceased founder of KFC. Johnnie Walker, the sophisticated refined gentleman made up to sell whiskey. These are hardly unique. There's Tony the Tiger, Geico the Gecko, the Kool Aid man, the Quaker Oats man, the Marlborough man, the Jolly Green Giant, the Energizer Bunny. And then there's logos which contain faces. Starbucks, Wendy's, pringles, M&MS, Mr. Clean, Betty Crocker, Captain Morgan, Birdseye, Prudential, Footlocker, the list goes on and on. But why? Why do companies humanise their logos? Why did Pete add big eyes and a smiley face to the octopus logo? Well, to explain why, I'm revisiting a recording I made three years ago with a world leading expert on branding.

[Aaron Ahuvia]

I'm Aaron Ahuvia. I'm a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. I study consumer psychology and I'm best known for my work on brand love and also my work on how consumer behavior influences happiness.

[Phil Agnew]

Aaron's book the Things We Love defines how these humanized brands like McDonald's, KFC and Johnnie Walker, how these brands affect us, how they make us buy, stay loyal to and potentially even love these brands. The foundation of his research is on something called anthropomorphic thinking. Anthropomorphic thinking is how all of us tend to give human like characteristics, emotions and intentions to non human entities such as animals, objects, brands and even natural phenomena like clouds. It's a way for us to make sense of the world around us and can be seen in everyday examples like talking about moody weather or a stubborn computer or a grumpy cat.

[Aaron Ahuvia]

It is possible to think about people in the way we normally think about objects. And it's also possible to think about objects in the ways we normally think about people. Anthropomorphism is the situation in which we look at an object and for whatever reason, we start thinking about it as if it was a person. But it could also happen if the object sounds like a person. Siri on your cell phone that you talk to is a good example. Or if it behaves like a person. Any of those situations can produce this kind of result.

[Phil Agnew]

There's a 2007 study which reveals how anthropomorphic thinking affects us. Now, imagine coming face to face with a talking plastic cat and you are asked to turn off this plastic cat. Sounds like a very easy task, right? You're just turning off an object. It's like unplugging a toaster. But a study conducted by Christoph Bartnik at the University of Canterbury found that it is not very easy to do this. In the study, participants were asked to interact with the torture talking cat and then received instructions from the researchers to turn it off. But as soon as the cat heard these instructions, it started pleading for its life. It begged the participants not to turn it off. There's an audio clip from the study. It starts with the researchers asking the participant to switch off the robot immediately. But the participant doesn't turn it off straight away.

[Aaron Ahuvia]

I will switch you off. It can't be true. Switch me off?

[Pete Miller]

Yes.

[Aaron Ahuvia]

You are not really going to switch me off?

[Phil Agnew]

Yes, I will.

[Aaron Ahuvia]

You can decide. Completely switch. Hugs. I will be completely silent. Okay. Could that be an idea? Please, please. You can still change your mind.

[Phil Agnew]

No, no, no, no, no, no,

[Aaron Ahuvia]

no.

[Phil Agnew]

At first she agrees to the robot being quiet. She thinks maybe we can get away with not turning it off. But then she decides to turn it off. She also argues with it as well. This is anthropomorphism. The participant acts as if she's talking with a human. Despite the toy's obvious inanimate nature. The participants brains responded using many of the thought processes they would normally reserve for people. Many participants feel reluctant to do something the cat didn't like and even reasoned with it in order to justify their decisions. The participant in our clip did manage to switch off the robot after a bit of back and forth. But some participants never did, despite being told by the professor to do so. Follow up research showed the same anthropomorphic thinking can stop dieters from dieting.

[Aaron Ahuvia]

In this study, they left people with a plate of cookies and the people didn't think they were being observed, but they just went to see. It's fairly easy to tell how many cookies the person ate. And what they found is that the cookies were nearly identical. But in one Case they had a little bit of icing on it and it was just decorative. And the other case they had a little bit of icing on it and it made the cookie look a little bit like a human face. And they found that people ate more of the cookies that looked like human face. A lot of the reason people did this is they felt that the cookie sort of wanted to be eaten. The cookie was asking them to be eaten, giving them permission to eat the cookie, and sort of the cookie was talking them into this decision. And so they went, you know, so they ate more as a response. And to my amazement, this normally only happens at a subconscious level, but sometimes people can become aware of this. And when they were debriefing people afterwards and telling them about the study, several people told them straight out, yeah, Mr. Cookie wanted me to eat him and so I ate more of the cookie.

[Phil Agnew]

And Aaron says, this is why so many brands create logos that look a bit human, like.

[Aaron Ahuvia]

So from a marketing perspective, we see increased use of anthropomorphism. More and more brands are starting to produce products that look or sound like people, because in general, it does help people form these relationships. And also there's sort of a positivity bias. We tend to like people, we think people are good. And so if an object unconsciously gets classified as a person, people generally like it more. There's sort of a little bit of a plus that it gets there. However, there is also a danger, which is if a product, say it's a computer, if it doesn't function well, or you're trying to make it get it to do something and it won't cooperate with you. And you notice I use the word cooperate, which is very already anthropomorphizing, right? Because computers are not cooperative or non cooperative really. But if it's not performing the way you'd like to, if you just think of it as an inert machine, then you get frustrated with the computer. But you don't blame the computer in the same way. However, if you anthropomorphize it and you think of your computer as a human at some nonconscious level, then when it doesn't do what you want, it's not just a problem, it's being a jerk, right? Or the term you might use might be somewhat stronger than jerk. And this gets people to be very angry. So if things aren't working out right and the product is anthropomorphic, you can actually have a much stronger negative response to it than you would if it was Just some inert object.

[Phil Agnew]

This is why KFC, McDonald's, Johnny Walkers and others use human characters in their brand. Not because they stand out. They don't. But because they increase the chances that we'll like the brand. However, brands should be careful. This increased attention will make customers hold these products to a higher account. So let's go back to Pete and his octopus logo, which the company have named Constantine.

[Pete Miller]

Constantine is our octopus. He's now our octopus and is a very well defined character for listeners in other countries. Konstantin is bright pink, small, big eyes, small mouth, and really small tentacles. Very cute. And those small tentacles was definitely a learning. Like you make an octopus much more trustworthy by making the tentacles small and the eyes big. But that's taken a lot of iteration. Actually. We've tried lots of different variations of octopus. And what was really interesting was when we started putting octopuses on our billboards. So when we put Constantine, our octopus, on our billboards, we get these eye tracking reports that show where people view these digital billboards. And you could see straight away, like when you're advertising in out of home positions, people, you get a fraction of a second to capture someone's attention. And as soon as we put a bright pink face with big eyes and a smile on those billboards, you could see a red hot spot on those heat maps of where everybody's eyes are drawn to. It was really, really obvious.

[Phil Agnew]

Pete's proven what Aaron Hoovier showed in the lab. Brands with anthropomorphic logos seem to garner more attention.

[Pete Miller]

I think we've been quite unorthodox in the kind of traditional branding space of like taking something that's kind of ostensibly a logo. Right. A logo is meant to be a fixed asset that you use in one form everywhere and you try and reinforce it every single time you can. And it's really consistent. But actually Konstantin is our mascot as well. So it's got this kind of dual role of like a logo and a mascot. And as a mascot, he does all these kind of bizarre things. He drives cars, dances, plants, trees, like literally hugs a planet every now and again. So there's definitely some interesting issues with scale, but we'll sort that out. But we are often playing with this kind of tension of building a brand that's instantly recognizable and a logo that's instantly recognizable with a mascot that's lovable and engaging and interesting.

[Phil Agnew]

Be distinct within your comparison set and use human like features. These two tips, on their own, they aren't enough to make a perfect logo, but they could help that is all for today folks. Thank you both to Pete Miller and Aaron Ahuvier for joining me on Nudge. Pete and I went on to have a much longer conversation covering the many behavioral science interventions that Octopus Energy have implemented. We covered how they let customers personalize their hold music, their famous spinning wheel of fortune, and why they send out 40,000 free electric blankets a year. Octopus, more so than any other company I can think of, apply behavioral science across their whole organization. And we explain how in next week's episode. To make sure you don't miss that episode, be sure to subscribe to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts and you can subscribe to the Nudge newsletter. Not only will you get my top behavioral science tip of the week, you get that on Friday, you subscribe, but you also get an email every Monday morning as soon as I publish the new episode. So if you want to listen straight away, subscribe to the newsletter. To do that, head to nudgepodcast.com that's nudgepodcast.com and click newsletter in the menu. That is all from me. Thank you again for listening. Pete and I will be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Cheers.