Besides the 3D effect, it’s just a boring white letter T with a little flair in the middle. Texas’s would fall towards the bottom third for me since I dislike the 3D effect – 3D designs seem to add complexity without adding anything actually interesting. “Personally I am not a fan of just ‘here is the letter for our team,’ which unfortunately is most MLB hat logos. “I feel like taking away the red drop shadow is something to be considered, maybe switching it to just an outline.” “I don’t think anyone would be particular offended or enamored by it – it’s just a big serif ‘T’ with a nice drop shadow.” However the font just seems like the default selection in Microsoft Word.” I like the color scheme, especially since it sets itself apart from most other teams in that sense. Also, they could have used less gray in the border for the letters.” “I believe this insignia would go in the bottom third, just because I’m not a fan of most of the crossing letter designs. While it is infinitely better than the logo they just retired, there are no unique elements and it doesn’t even resemble what would be traditionally viewed as a baseball logo.” I think a white outline would make the C more discernible.” “It’s generic and there isn’t a highlight color to make the C pop. Unsurprisingly, there were a variety of viewpoints about each insignia. Displayed below are some of the responses that typified common sentiments about each cap insignia. They were asked to give their personal opinions and to speculate where they thought other fans would rank the logo they were randomly assigned to assess. To get some open-ended feedback on each logo, I gave each respondent the option to give his or her opinion on a randomly selected cap insignia. It is important to note that these scores should not be interpreted as votes.
For example, the White Sox logo’s MaxDiff score of 125 means that logo was ranked 25% higher than the average logo in this ranking exercise. The MaxDiff scores for each team are indexed at 100. How about we just get to the results already? HERE ARE THE RESULTS: Compared to an old school ranking exercise, this produces more accurate rankings that truly reflect how people really feel. In each set they indicate the logo they find most and least appealing.īecause respondents evaluate many sets, it allows me the ability to compute the rankings at the end of data collection using fancy math ( Hierarchical Bayes). Instead of giving respondents every logo all at once, the exercise instead gives them four logos at a time in sets. If you want people to tell you how they really feel, you have to make it easy and fun for them to tell you that’s what MaxDiff does. People don’t like to spend a ton of time thinking, especially when taking an online survey. Furthermore, that exercise would be time-consuming, would require a lot of thinking, and would not be very fun. If I were to present you with all 30 MLB cap logos and ask you to put a ‘1’ beside your favorite logo, a ‘2’ beside your second favorite logo, and so on, it is really a toss up if your rankings would truly reflect how you really feel, especially when it comes to the logos in the middle (#10 – #20) of your rankings.
People can’t rank more than six or seven items at a time in survey research. MaxDiff is a market research technique that’s useful when you have a list of items that is too long for the average person to meaningfully rank. If you need to rank 30 logos, you need a MaxDiff exercise. The Yankees are probably the best example of this. For some teams the cap insignia is much more likely to come to mind when you think of the mark that best represents that team. Major League Baseball is different than the other major American sports leagues in that MLB teams tend to have two logos – an “official” logo and a cap insignia.
After releasing those results, I received a TON of requests from baseball fans to do the same exercise for the MLB’s cap insignias (aka – “hat logos”). Last summer, I recruited 3,792 fans to participate in a MaxDiff market research study with the goal of meaningfully ranking the official MLB logos in the minds of fans (check out those results here).