McDonald’s is the more successful company by a mile, and its golden arches are recognizable from blocks away. But at according to a new paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Burger King has a bett...

Finally, the researchers speculate that brands with a broad reach of services, like Uber or Procter & Gamble, probably benefit from more abstract symbols that don’t pin them down to a single product offe...

In one study, the authors designed a fictional mountain gear brand and a fictional sushi restaurant. Each fake brand was given two different logos: one descriptive and one abstract.

For instance, the mountain gear brand’s descriptive logo ...

There are cases, the researchers found, where descriptive logos are the wrong way to go—namely, if consumers don’t like your product.

In other words, if someone is buying palm oil—or perhaps bug repellent, or a funeral home service, as the authors write—keep dead bodies...