British food retailer Sainsbury’s is set to rebrand this December, temporarily rejigging its logo to push sales of Dreamworks Animated film ‘Shrek Forever After’. The move has been hailed as ‘the first ever rebranding in 141 years of Sainsbury’s history’ by some media outlets. It’s an interesting observation, though it’s also completely and utterly wrong: the previous logo was retired only a decade ago when the Sainsbury’s logo was altered to be written with lowercase lettering. It bears mentioning also that prior to that redesign, the brand was traditionally branded with a preceeding ‘J’ after its founder.

This confusion is interesting in itself though. It exposes the somewhat stale image of the brand, and the effectiveness of the Shrek statement. Perhaps your own brand has achieved such a level of establishment. If people can’t remember a time when your logo wasn’t as it currently is, a custom logo design variation can be incredibly effective. In this case there is of course a large amount of interest on the side of Dreamworks, the partner for the rebranding. ‘Shrek Forever After’ was another success, but public perception has been turning against Dreamworks for some time. Not since the original Shrek film has Pixar managed to outdo Dreamworks at the box office, and ‘Shrek Forever After’ was pipped to the post by Toy Story 3. Despite the Dreamworks motivation behind the deal, it is undeniable that Sainsbury’s stands only to gain by challenging perceptions about its brand..

It’s a practice common among more forward thinking companies. Google is the classic example, with 700 Google ‘doodles’ having been used internationally to mark everything from Hokusai’s birthday to the 30th Anniversary of the release of Pac-Man. If you want to keep your brand relevant, being more literally ‘timely’ can be a way you can literally achieve this. So, can you achieve this with your own Business logos? Unless you have a big marketing budget and partners to support it, the Sainsbury’s style rebranding of store signs and displays will be prohibitively expensive. But you can really let your imagination run wild when it comes to your electronic presence. It’s really something worth considering, but stick to themes that are appropriate: your national holidays are always relevant, but so are your industry heroes and milestone advances.