Apple’s cool Major League Soccer logo mash-ups are changing the rules of co-branding

As the 30^th season of Major League Soccer (MLS) kicked off last month, the league unveiled an interesting new design addition: Each of its 30 teams sported a custom Apple TV logo on the left sleeve of its uniform featuring the colors and graphic elements of the team’s identity incorporated within the familiar Apple icon. For example, the Chicago Fire version includes the six-pointed star from the city’s flag and the team’s crest, while Atlanta United’s is filled with the characteristic five red and black stripes that adorn the club’s shirt. This effort, part of MLS’s 10-year deal with Apple to stream the league’s matches, represents an innovative step forward in its approach to co-branding.

Branding has come a long way from the days of the corporate identity manual strictly dictating how a logo could be used. Although today’s brand guidelines, such as the set released earlier this year by Cash App, often still admonish “Do not alter the logo” and “Do not use with unapproved colors,” there are now caveats: As the Cash App document puts it, “All of the above rules can be disregarded when creating illustrative treatments of the logo for marketing/promotional purposes. In this context, we encourage experimentation and favor expression over restraint.”

So it’s not surprising that Apple might allow for so many new variations of its logo. But unlike the flexible logo approach pioneered by MTV, or even the identity systems used by MLS and Major League Baseball, in which each team gets a version of the league logo in its own colors (the MLS version sits right above the Apple TV logo on the left sleeve), these latest co-branded little apples are notable in that they represent the outcome of a sort of logo alchemy in which the design components of altogether separate organizations have been recombined into new forms, in a novel way of visually denoting partnerships between brands. They are like the fanciful and unofficial “logo mash-ups” that one can find online suddenly made real.

Over history, various sorts of graphically symbolic expressions of partnership or collaboration between different entities have been employed. A friendship between two nations, for example, might simply be represented by a depiction of their two flags crossed at the staffs. In European heraldry, alliances between families through marriage could be expressed by “quartering” a heraldic shield—dividing it into four parts, with the symbols of each family occupying two parts apiece. This explains why the state flag of Maryland is such a glorious mess; it is the banner of arms of Lord Baltimore, with the colors of the Calvert family in the first and fourth quarters, and those of the Crossland family in the second and third.

Recent years have seen the emergence of collaborations between brands that are frequently expressed by placing an “x” between the two brand names or logos, as in “Nike x Supreme,” with the “x” often standing for the word “by.” The “x” not only recalls the alliance implied by crossed flagstaffs, but it levels up from mere addition to the more synergistically powerful mathematical operation of multiplication. Other contemporary brand collabs, though, employ division, displaying the logos of the partners separated by a thin vertical line (as Apple Watch did with Nike).

Sometimes, though, certain brands and logos are not suited well to sitting next to each other. For instance, when the University of Utah, whose school color is red, named Pepsi its “official beverage provider” in 2017, it came with the stipulation that Pepsi downplay its signature blue color, which is similar to that of Utah’s rival, Brigham Young University.

It’s this sort of graphic discrepancy that undermines to some degree Apple’s audacious co-branding with MLS. The relatively small size of the teams’ Apple TV logos and the resulting limitations on the graphic imagery that can be used with them—as well as the fact that they are often the same color as the shirt on which they appear—can make them difficult to see. But, perhaps as with the Maryland flag, the point is ultimately not aesthetic but relational. By creating these 30 junior versions of its logo, Apple is signaling camaraderie with MLS fans in hopes of engendering their goodwill.

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