Automobiles - It's All About the Image

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

- Peter De Vries

For the last 19 years, I've been relegated to mom-mobiles so I could drive around my four kids and their friends. But now that I have two young adult drivers, I found myself looking for a small, fuel-efficient car to do my everyday driving. The question was, what car to get?

I started looking around on the road for cars that I liked. I saw one that had the Kia logo on it, so I went to the Kia website. Turns out the car I saw was the Kia Soul.

When I go to the website, I don't just see a picture of the car. I get a flash "tour" - I can rotate the car to get different views, along with images of the interior and options. The website designers also made sure to include important facts on the image - things to make me keep looking - like the economical base price and the 5 star safety rating. With cars, it's all about image, isn't it? Speaking of image, if I could afford a Mercedes, here's the car I see on their international website.

Nice, huh? Just a little out of my price range, though...

Images, illustrations, symbols - we're surrounded by them every day to the point where we don't even know that we know them. I mean, we all know the automotive manufacturer symbols: Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Subaru, Chevy. They are some of the most recognized symbols in the world.

Let's look at another company that's famous for its look and logo - Apple, Inc. Apple frequently changes their homepage design, but on the day I visited, here's what it looked like.

Pretty striking, huh? It's still got the Apple look and feel - lots of white space, clean, uncluttered. All your navigation is done by clicking on the images on the screen, or by using the unobtrusive menu bar at the top of the page.

They have a link to the popular Mac vs. PC ads, but again, the title is unobtrusive. They offer a video for the iMac, but they don't force you to play it every time you visit the page. So not only is their logo famous, but their look and feel immediately tells you it's Apple, and their navigation is simple and streamlined, using lots of linked images.

Another company that has a famous logo and look and feel is Target. I don't know what it is about Target commercials, but I always know it's for Target even before they display the logo at the end. And it's not that they're always red and white - they're not. It's just something about the images, the music, the whole combination that lets you know it's Target. And of course you don't even have to see the name Target - all you have to see is the famous bullseye at the end and you know you're right.