A monopoly has gone to the grave, a new market has been unleashed and all of a sudden, new pharmacy’s pops up like fungus in Sweden. The idea of deregulation is to reduce prices, increase opening hours and improve the accessibility. It is clear that the companies are in need of a trustworthy identity. How should the new brands appear for a target audience who for decades had no choice but to relay on just one company and never had to reflect on the matter? Since we are studying visual communication, we have chosen to see this issue from a visual perspective. How do you make a new visual identity, profile, logo trustworthy? What is visual trustworthiness in the first case? And how do the new pharmacy businesses use shape, colour and symbol? So our purpose is to investigate how the companies succeeded in creating trustworthy logos within the pharmacy industry.

As a starting point, we have chosen to do qualitative semiotic picture analysis of four of the newly established pharmacy logos. Apoteket AB, Apotek hjärta, DocMorris and Kronas droghandel. A semiotic analysis is of course very subjective, and our association tracks fly’s freely. In our theory chapter, we find out how the symbols in the logos has been used before, their origin and what they stood for historically and compare that to our analysis.

We can conclude from our study that all choose to use well-established symbols, and for the most similar colours. They actually manages quite well with being just visually trustworthy. However, we find some clashes, but perhaps primarily linguistic rather than visual.