Last year, Kia decided to change the logo to a more modern one, but the updated version caused confusion among users – some can’t even read the correct name and turn to Google Search to figure out – what is the new car brand “KN”?
According to data posted by the owner of the advertising agency, Ashwin Krishnaswamy, on Twitter, about 30,000 people search for a KN car every month on the Internet. Searches peaked around March 2021, a few months after the new logo was announced. It also happened around the time the rebadged Kia Stinger went on sale, meaning people saw the car on the road and didn’t even know who made it.
the new kia logo is so unreadable that at least 30k people a month search for the “KN car” ever since its debut pic.twitter.com/jRj25JoAPp
— Ashwinn (@Shwinnabego) November 17, 2022
Other popular searches with thousands of queries per month include “kn car brand,” “kn car logo,” and “kn carnival car” (“carnival” being Kia’s name for a minivan).
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The new logo, as before, confused people, this was already written on Creative Bloq. Yes, some Twitter users confused the logo with the logo of the American music group Nine Inch Nails.
The good news is that Google can point users in the right direction – the top result for KN car is the Kia website.
But when the journalist of the website The Drive tried to find KN car in other search engines — DuckDuckGo and Bing, for example, did not manage. Currently, the former has only one link to the automaker’s site on the first page of results (oddly enough, it directs people to the Kia Niro page), while the latter has none. However, search engines show all the articles written about the confusion, and that should point people in the right direction.
The real victim could be K&N auto parts. Their site currently ranks pretty high in the KN car search results, but one small fix from Google could bury it.
Source: The Verge, The Drive
