Skip to main content

The most prominent logo on LG’s best phone is Bang & Olufsen’s

The most prominent logo on LG’s best phone is Bang & Olufsen’s

/

LG is suffering from a lack of branding self-belief

Share this story

LG V30
LG V30
Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge

Today, LG unveiled what easily qualifies as its nicest, most refined, and most promising smartphone of all time. The LG V30 ticks almost all the design, spec, and feature boxes while deftly avoiding the gimmicks that have plagued LG’s previous efforts. And just as this moment in the global spotlight arrives for LG, the logo most of the world will see is that of Bang & Olufsen. What the hell?

In the United States, LG will distribute the V30 with its “V30” graphic featured in the middle of the phone’s back. In other places, that spot might be occupied by network operator insignia, but for the majority of markets, the big, round, and utterly classic Bang & Olufsen logo will be the one most closely associated with the V30.

LG has a partnership with B&O that saw the latter produce a hi-fi audio module for the G5, and just this week Bang & Olufsen’s first OLED TV was an LG panel augmented with some of that Danish design and audio engineering. Inside the LG V30 box, there’s a pair of B&O Play (Bang & Olufsen’s more affordable consumer brand, which, confusingly, still uses the B&O logo) earphones that are tuned specifically to sound great from the V30. LG even makes some unspecific claims about B&O Play contributing to tuning the audio system inside its awesome new smartphone. So, sure, the Bang & Olufsen brand can be on the outside of the V30, I don’t have a problem with its presence — I’m just a bit shocked by its prominence.

When HTC owned Beats, it put the audio brand’s logo on its phones under flimsy pretences, but at least it tucked it down at the bottom by the spot where regulatory and certification labels reside on most devices. Huawei decorates the camera lenses of its phones with the Leica brand, but the biggest name on any Huawei phone is still, you know, Huawei. LG has inverted that: it has put B&O where the LG graphic belongs, and it has relegated its own branding to the “credits” at the bottom rear of the phone. A Bang & Olufsen phone by LG, as it were.

I know some might argue that this is just good self-awareness from LG, which definitely doesn’t have the brand cachet of B&O and whose device might thus be better received with the Danish audio experts’ visuals featured. But the bottom line is that this is misleading branding: the audio superiority of the V30 is thanks to LG and its use of four ESS Sabre digital-to-analog converters. B&O isn’t doing anything there. B&O also didn’t finesse and refine the design of this impressively slender, minimalist, handsome phone. The Full Vision display? That’s LG Display’s research and engineering. The new camera with a glass lens and the widest aperture yet seen on a phone? LG again, no Bang & Olufsen contributions to speak of.

One of these days, LG will finally get it right and nail down all the details that have been eluding its grasp over all these years of trying to make a great phone. And when it does, I would like the company to have the self-belief to claim all the credit that it rightly deserves. As things stand, with the next Google Pixel XL also shaping up to be built on the same hardware as the V30, LG might end up producing two of the best smartphones of the year, and neither will feature its name as the main brand.