What Danish business looks like

Denmark is blue

More than four in ten of the analysed brands (43 percent) have blue or turquoise as their primary colour. Red is a distant second. And the clichés about industries hold up when you measure them: in the energy sector 64 percent of brands are blue (9 of 14), in finance 68 percent (17 of 25). Furthest from blue are food and construction, where only about one brand in five is blue (4 of 18 and 3 of 15).

At the other end of the scale it is almost empty. Purple and pink as a primary colour appear at very few brands across the whole field (22 of 340).

Each square is one primary brand colour (340 brands). The colours are grouped by spectrum; blue and turquoise take up 43 percent.

And if you zoom in, the field divides: among brands that sell to businesses, six in ten are blue (60 percent, 53 of 88), while this applies to only just over one in three of those that sell to consumers (37 percent, 51 of 139). The more professional the relationship, the bluer the colour.

This is no coincidence. Blue signals security and competence, and that is exactly why everyone chooses it. But a colour that everyone in the category carries cannot carry recognition. If customers are to remember your brand by its colour, the colour has to be yours, not the category's.

One in four brands writes with one of the same five typefaces

The most frequent typefaces across the field are Inter, Roboto, Montserrat, Open Sans and Poppins. Five typefaces, all free and all excellent. Among the brands where we can read the typefaces on the site (275 of 348), one in four uses at least one of them (68), and just under one in three uses one of the ten most frequent (86). That is a lot in a field where the choice is in principle endless, and the typefaces are so widespread that they rarely say anything about the sender.

The typeface is otherwise one of the cheapest distinctive assets a brand can own: it appears on everything the brand ever writes. When one brand in four sets its identity in the same five typefaces, the identity literally stands in other people's letters.

And among lifestyle brands, the logo is black

The third pattern surprised us. Monochrome logos (black/white) are found in the field first and foremost in the fashion, design and lifestyle segment. Four in ten brands in that group (24 of 57) carry what we call the uniform: a wordmark in capitals, set in a neutral grotesque with uniform stroke weight, without colour. The concentration is clearest among lifestyle and design brands, from furniture to fashion. In industry, energy, transport and finance it is largely absent.

And here comes the twist: the "ordinary" is often expensive. Several of the field's design brands have had precisely the neutral grotesque they carry custom drawn. Minimalism is a deliberate choice, and it suits the category. But when everyone in the category chooses the same black capital grotesque, minimalism has become a new conformity, just as uniform as the blue logos in finance. Then something else has to carry recognition: the product, the image style, the voice.

And almost no one dares to stand with the symbol alone

The logos confirm the picture from another angle. A logo can basically do three things: be the name itself (the wordmark), a symbol next to the name (the logomark), or the symbol entirely alone, like Nike's swoosh or Apple's apple. In our field the last discipline is practically absent, and it is not cowardice but honesty: the symbol alone only works once recognition has been built, and that takes decades. Almost all Danish brands therefore keep the name in the logo.

But that makes the typeface and the colour even more important. A wordmark is only as distinct as the typeface it is set in, and when the typeface is one of the five most people use, and the colour is the category's, the logo carries no recognition of its own. The circle is closed: the three patterns are in reality one.