Is Walmart's Spark Logo Strong Enough to Stand on Its Own? Headquarters Thinks So.

In a consumer culture replete with brand names, only a relative handful of companies can get away with the intrepid move of leaving out their names and relying on their logos alone. Nike’s swoosh and McDonald’s golden arches can stand on their own, for instance. So can Apple’s apple and Target’s target.

And, at some point in the future, Walmart hopes to join this club, too—at least, if its latest brand refresh is any indication.

On Monday, the retailing colossus unveiled the first major refresh to its brand assets since 2008. The tweaks are subtle—mostly a bulking up of its typeface along with some color adjustments—but the simplicity belies more ambitious aims.

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Speaking with ADWEEK, Walmart’s creative VP David Hartman acknowledged that the visual refinements are incremental. “We’re building on assets that the customer recognizes from Walmart—we’ve strengthening those assets,” he said.

Subtlety aside, however, “we want to be able to build and strengthen the equity we have in the spark,” Hartman said, “so that it can be—eventually—a standalone symbol for our brand.”

At first blush, the design department’s tweaks aren’t easy to spot. So here they are, broken down by the typography and the brand badge itself.

Walmart’s lettering

Hartman’s team spent many hours in the company archives, where they came across photos of founder Sam Walton wearing his trademark trucker cap bearing the brand name. Walton wore the cap to emphasize the common-man roots of the company. That hat—now in the Smithsonian—featured a bolder typeface, and the updated wordmark marks a return to that more assertive visual presence.

“I like what they did—I think it’s quite good,” said Thomas Ordahl, founder of brand consultancy OrdahlCo. The bolder look “is more human, tapping into Sam Walton connection,” he said. “With all the changes in technology and AI, you want to maintain a human connection with your consumers.”

If the changes err on the side of restraint, Ordahl believes that it’s the right step for a company of Walmart’s size and stature, which is unlikely to make radical changes.

“This is a journey for them,” he said. “If they want to start to modernize and bring more warmth into their brand experience, this is one component.”

Walmart’s logo

The spark, as its own, has been muscled up, kerned to reduce the space between the beams. Walmart has also switched to more saturated colors (True Blue and Spark Yellow, in company parlance.) The changes should make the logo “a little more effective at any scale,” Hartman said.

In the long term, management hopes a heftier profile will also allow the logo to stand on its own—without the Walmart name—in certain settings. “Especially when you look at how the brand appears in a digital context, on the app tile, on the site, on the home page—that’s definitely the direction that we’re leading,” Hartman said.

That’s a worthwhile aim to be sure, but Clark Goolsby, chief creative officer for Chase Design Group, said that a visual tweak is only a first step.

“As a designer, I can create assets that have the potential to become iconic, but it is up to the business to make them iconic,” he said. “If their goal is to use it without their wordmark,” Goolsby continued, the brand “needs to be ready to invest considerable time, be faithfully consistent and make myriad impressions to achieve this goal.”