The lumber yard/hardware store/contracting business owned by my Dad’s side of the family sold General Electric appliances. The GE “ball” logo was everywhere in our home, especially after Dad built the house I spent the latter half of my childhood in. At one time, my grandparents, and each family of my dad’s siblings had the exact same dishwasher, and they were all emblazoned with “GE Potscrubber” across the front. You could also change the color of the front panel of the dishwasher, but that’s a different blog entry.
As a child of this GE atmosphere, coupled with the fact that both paternal grandparents at one time worked for General Electric at Electronics Park before I was born, I learned to associate GE with quality. It’s one of the reasons I chose GEnie, the General Electric Network Information Exchange, as my first online experience.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the GE brand is that the company and its subsidiaries have maintained a consistent logo for over 100 years. There are slight variations in the “GE Ball”, but for the most part, anyone and everyone knows what that symbols means. Unlike Coke and Pepsi and Target and Walmart, who update their logo with the times, GE’s logo is timeless. Aside from that first incarnation in 1892, it has looked the same for nearly 125 years, and I think that’s pretty nifty.
It’s a quality logo that has withstood the test of time.
The only time I’ve found GE branding confusing is as found on a spacemaker laundry unit in the condos at Walt Disney World’s Saratoga Springs Resort.
Here’s the unit was simply labeled “GE Quality Product” any in no place featured the familiar GE logo. I can only assume someone else built the unit for GE and GE was just licensing out the name. Today GE’s laundry products are actually made by Haier, and GE lends out their logo to maintain familiar branding.
One of my favorite fonts was also created by GE. I use this font all through my Linux desktop setups (Windows and Apple don’t let users change the font). This font is called GE Inspira and it has a nice modern touch to it. You can find it through a simple web search.
I now have the old jingle, “GE, we bring good things to living, we bring good things to life” rattling around in my brain.
