The credit card company Mastercard is removing its name from its logo. It will follow Apple and Nike in having a logo that has no writing. Mastercard traditionally used a logo that had overlapping yellow and red circles with the word "Mastercard" written on them. It has decided to drop the word "Mastercard" and use just the two circles in a wordless logo. The new logo will be the symbol on its credit cards and in stores and at sports events. The company said over 80 per cent of people instantly recognized the new symbol without the word "Mastercard".
Mastercard did much research for more than 20 months on how recognizable the new wordless logo was. The logo is part of a wider strategy to move from being a credit card company to a digital payments company. The world is full of well-known logos that have no words. Apple's bitten apple logo and Nike's swoosh are examples. Most logos of apps on smartphones are just symbols. A design expert said a small logo on a phone or watch needed to be powerful. He said: "You're trying to optimize for a very small piece...of glass....A 10-letter name is kind of a monster."