Tokyo, September 1981.

SoftBank began as a business that sold other people’s software. Wikipedia says the company was founded on 3 September 1981 as SOFTBANK Corp by Masayoshi Son, initially as a software distributor. The name describes that original job quite literally: a bank, or store, of software from which retailers could draw. The capitalised spelling of the early years has since given way to the mixed-case “SoftBank” used across the group’s companies today.

Publishing followed within a year. In May 1982, Wikipedia says, SoftBank entered the magazine business with Oh! PC and Oh! MZ, titles about NEC and Sharp computers respectively. A computer magazine is a natural companion to a software catalogue, and the two activities gave the young company a printed voice as well as a warehouse. The magazines also put the company’s name in front of the hobbyists and office workers who were buying early personal computers in Japan.

The company’s later moves took the SoftBank name into new territory. On 28 January 2005, Wikipedia says, SoftBank became the owner of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, a Nippon Professional Baseball team, which put the name on a stadium, on uniforms and in the sports pages. A year later came the step that made the name familiar on Japanese streets. On 17 March 2006, Wikipedia records, SoftBank announced its agreement to buy Vodafone Japan, and in May that year the unit was renamed SoftBank Mobile, effective 1 October 2006.

The renaming meant a mobile network that had carried a British name since 2003 now carried a Japanese one. Shops, handsets and billboards had to change, and the company needed a way to introduce its name to consumers who knew it, if at all, from computer shops and baseball. The answer, as the second part of this guide shows, came from a talking dog. Before that, though, the company already had a mark with a story of its own.

Two lines and a talking dog.

SoftBank’s logo is made of two parallel lines, and they come from history rather than geometry. Wikipedia says the logo of SoftBank is based on the flag of the Kaientai, a naval trading company founded in 1865, near the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, by Sakamoto Ryōma. The Kaientai combined shipping and trade, and its flag carried horizontal bands that SoftBank reduced to two lines. The result is a mark made of two bars rather than letters, with a story that has to be told rather than seen.

The link to Ryōma is personal. Global Voices reported in June 2010, when a television drama about Ryōma was running in Japan, that Masayoshi Son was a publicly enthusiastic fan of Ryōma, and noted as a “random fact” that SoftBank’s logo is based on that of Ryōma’s trading company, the Kaientai. The same post quoted a 2009 message from Son describing Ryōma as a historical figure he deeply respected. A company that began by trading software borrowed its mark from a company that began by trading goods by sea.

The mobile business needed a public face, and found it in a family. GIGAZINE reported in October 2008 on the SoftBank Mobile “White Family” adverts, which follow the happy Shirato household: daughter Aya, played by Aya Ueto; the mother, played by Kanako Higuchi; the elder brother, played by Dante Carver; and Oto-san, the father, who is a white Hokkaido dog. Despite being a dog, the site said, Oto-san is looked up to and always has the last word.

The dog became merchandise. GIGAZINE described a small talking strap of Oto-san that SoftBank Mobile gave to new customers, which shouted one of five lines from the adverts when squeezed. The family name is a pun the commercials never had to explain: “shiro” is Japanese for white, and the family is the White Family. The campaign turned a renamed network into a cast of characters that viewers could follow from one advert to the next.

Founders, flags and families.

Corporate names in East Asia often carry a meaning of their own. A company may take its name from a word for a mood or a hope, from a line of classical poetry, or from a folk tale known well beyond the region, and that meaning is then repeated in speeches, annual events and advertising. The name works as a small story that customers can retell.

Mascots are another recurring device. A drawn animal or character can stand in for a service that has no physical product, appearing on screens, plush toys, packaging and office signage, and it can stay in use long after the logo beside it has been redrawn.

For businesses that live inside phones, the app icon is frequently the version of the identity that people see every day. Icons are reduced to a single closed shape and one or two colours so they remain legible at fingertip size, while the full wordmark is kept for larger formats.

Campaign naming built on calendar dates is a further pattern: a day and month written as numbers become the name of an annual event, which can be printed, counted down and repeated every year.

The Shirato family abroad.

The Shirato family also travelled. When SoftBank bought the American carrier Sprint, it took the idea of a mismatched advertising family with it. SoraNews24 reported on 26 March 2014 that Sprint’s new “Framily” commercial, with a father who is a talking hamster and a daughter who speaks only French, was inspired by SoftBank’s long-running Shirato family commercials in Japan, with their talking dog and Dante Carver. The site said the Japanese adverts had featured celebrities including Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones, and called the American family, the Frobinsons, a version that played off the Shirato dynamic.

That transfer says something about how SoftBank treats its brand. The logo is fixed and historical, a pair of lines borrowed from a nineteenth-century trading flag. The advertising is the opposite: absurd, serial and built around a character who could be recast. GIGAZINE already noted in 2008 that the dog had five catchphrases worth putting in a toy, and the formula proved portable enough to be tried in another country with a hamster in the dog’s place.

The name itself has stayed close to its original meaning even as the business changed. A software “bank” in 1981 became a magazine publisher in 1982, a baseball owner in 2005 and a mobile network in 2006, according to Wikipedia, and each new business took the same two-word name and the same two-line mark. The company today is the holding company SoftBank Group, based in Tokyo, while the Japanese mobile business carries the SoftBank name on its own shops.

For a design guide, SoftBank shows how a very spare mark can carry a long historical story, while advertising characters do the work of making a corporate name feel familiar. Compare Sprint, the American carrier that borrowed the Shirato idea, and Arm, the chip designer in the same group. For this guide we use silver, slate and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SoftBank’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.