If we showed you two golden arches, what would come to mind?
You would probably think of McDonald’s immediately, without even needing to read the brand name. A single visual detail is enough to recognize it.
The same thing happens every day with dozens of delivery vans driving through our cities. Before we even read the logo, we already know which courier it is: DHL, UPS, GLS…
The reason is surprisingly simple: color. It may seem like a secondary element of brand identity, but in the logistics industry it is one of the most powerful communication tools available.
When a vehicle is moving, the time available to capture attention is extremely limited. The company name often isn’t even readable. The brain, however, instantly registers the color—and that’s where branding does its job.
Couriers provide perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon, but the same principle applies to any brand with a physical presence. From parcel lockers and Click & Collect locations to digital kiosks and pickup points, every touchpoint becomes an extension of the brand’s identity and helps make it recognizable within seconds.
In this article, we’ll explore why color is one of the most effective tools for building a strong brand identity and what retailers and businesses can learn from the logistics industry to create memorable proximity experiences.
Branding in the Last Mile: Why Every Vehicle Is a Media Channel
Many brands build awareness by waiting for customers to come to them—by entering a store, visiting a website, watching an advertisement, or walking past a storefront. Delivery companies operate according to a completely different logic.
They are the ones who reach the customer.
Every day, thousands of vans travel through our cities, cross residential neighborhoods, stop outside apartment buildings, offices, businesses, and retail stores. Few industries have a brand that is so consistently present in public spaces without purchasing traditional advertising. The vehicle itself becomes a media channel.
This isn’t just a perception. According to several studies compiled by 3M and based on research from Nielsen, OAAA, and ARD Ventures, a single branded vehicle can generate between 30,000 and 70,000 visual impressions per day, with a cost per impression significantly lower than many other advertising formats. In addition, 64% of people recall noticing the graphics on a commercial vehicle within the past month—a higher percentage than that recorded for many other forms of transit advertising.
The difference compared to a billboard is clear. A billboard stays in one place and waits for its audience. A delivery van, on the other hand, enters neighborhoods, parks outside people’s homes, drives through shopping districts, and accompanies customers throughout the last mile. It is one of the few moments when a brand literally arrives at the customer’s doorstep.
Two Seconds to Be Recognized: Why Color Comes Before the Logo
Designing a courier’s visual identity starts from one simple assumption: people have very little time to look at the vehicle.
A van crosses an intersection in seconds, a truck is overtaken in traffic, and a vehicle parked outside a home may only remain visible for a few minutes. During that brief moment, our brains don’t read—they recognize.
Neuroscience research shows that visual stimuli are processed extremely quickly and that elements such as color, contrast, and shape are identified before text is read. This is one of the reasons why the most effective visual identity systems don’t rely solely on a logo. Instead, they build a consistent visual language based on color palettes, geometric elements, and proportions. Recent research on visual branding also confirms that color is one of the key drivers of brand recall and emotional association.
This is why major brands spend years defining a consistent color palette. Color isn’t simply decorative—it accelerates recognition.
Think about Coca-Cola’s red, Tiffany’s blue, Milka’s purple, or easyJet’s orange. In many cases, simply seeing the color is enough to instantly recall the brand, even without the logo. In the delivery industry, this effect becomes even more significant because, as we’ve seen, exposure time is extremely limited.
Five Couriers, Five Different Ways to Communicate: Practical Examples of Last Mile Branding
Although they essentially provide the same service, the leading logistics operators have developed very different visual identities. This is no coincidence: every color tells a different brand story.
To understand how branding influences recognition in the Last Mile, we looked at five of Europe’s most extensive PUDO (Pick-Up Drop-Off) networks—DHL, UPS, GLS, DPD, and InPost—ranked by Last Mile Experts among the European networks with the highest density of pickup locations. Five companies, five color palettes, and five completely different personalities. Yet every one of them is instantly recognizable.
UPS, for example, has built much of its reputation around its iconic Pullman Brown, a shade of brown first adopted in the early twentieth century that has become one of the brand’s defining characteristics. It’s an unusual choice in an industry dominated by bright colors, yet perfectly aligned with the values of reliability, professionalism, and trust that the company wanted to communicate. Unsurprisingly, one of its most famous slogans was “What can Brown do for you?”, turning a simple color into a true communication asset.
DHL took a far more energetic approach. Its combination of yellow and red conveys speed, dynamism, and maximum visibility—a palette designed to stand out immediately in traffic while reinforcing its promise of fast deliveries.
GLS chose a different path by adopting a deep blue that communicates stability, security, and reliability. It is a color that conveys reassurance and trust, qualities that are essential when customers entrust a company with delivering their purchases.
DPD made crimson red one of the defining features of its visual identity. The vibrant shade evokes energy, movement, and speed, perfectly matching the brand’s positioning within the European parcel delivery market.
Finally, InPost selected a combination of yellow and black that emphasizes contrast and immediate recognition. These highly visible colors reflect a modern, dynamic identity consistent with a business model strongly focused on automated parcel lockers and Out-of-Home logistics.
In practice, after seeing a yellow van with red accents—or one of InPost’s yellow-and-black lockers—hundreds of times, the brain no longer needs to read the brand name. It recognizes it automatically. At that point, color stops being an aesthetic choice and becomes a cognitive shortcut. Put simply, it’s the fastest way a brand can say, “It’s me.”
From the Delivery Van to the Customer Touchpoint: Every Physical Presence Communicates the Brand
This principle doesn’t apply only to couriers. Today, any company with physical customer touchpoints faces the same challenge.
Parcel lockers, Click & Collect locations, digital kiosks, pop-up stores, automated retail corners, and information points are all part of the customer experience, just like a website or a mobile app. The difference is that they exist in the physical world, where attention spans are short and recognition must happen almost instantly.
Here, the same mechanisms that make a DHL or UPS vehicle instantly recognizable come into play. Colors, materials, finishes, shapes, and consistent design work together to create an identity that people perceive before they ever read a logo.
A logo takes time to read; a color requires only a glance. In the Last Mile, that difference can determine whether a brand gets noticed or overlooked. Every vehicle on the road, every pickup location, and every physical installation is an opportunity to strengthen the relationship with customers and make the brand immediately recognizable.
That’s why designing these touchpoints isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about applying branding to physical space.
After all, the brands we remember best aren’t always the ones we’ve read. They’re the ones we’ve learned to recognize.
Branding Doesn’t End with Design. It Begins with the Experience
If color is the first element that helps us recognize a brand, it’s the customer experience that makes it memorable.
In the Last Mile, recognition isn’t built solely through a consistent color palette or a well-designed logo. It depends on delivering a seamless experience across every touchpoint. From the moment customers choose an Out-of-Home delivery option to the moment they collect their parcel, every interaction strengthens—or weakens—their perception of the brand.
A parcel locker that doesn’t work properly, a pickup point that’s difficult to find, or a confusing collection process can undermine years of brand-building in just a few minutes. Conversely, a simple, intuitive, and consistent experience reinforces the brand promise and builds customer trust.
At GEL Proximity, we develop software solutions that help retailers, logistics operators, and proximity networks manage these services through a single integrated platform, ensuring a simple and consistent customer experience at every stage of the journey. Our technology works behind the scenes, allowing the retailer’s brand to remain at the center of the experience. From Pickup Point selection during checkout to customer communications, every interaction can preserve the same visual identity and brand voice. Because branding doesn’t end when a customer sees a pickup location—it continues when they use it.
Every courier has built its own visual identity over the years. A distinctive color, a logo, and a recognizable visual language. But customers don’t experience separate brands, they experience one continuous journey that involves retailers, couriers, parcel lockers, pickup points, and different technology platforms. This is where orchestration becomes essential. At GEL Proximity, we connect all these players, transforming an ecosystem of different brands and colors into one seamless, consistent Last Mile experience. Our goal isn’t to add another color to the logistics landscape, but to ensure that all the others work together.
Ultimately, that’s the real challenge of the Last Mile. Being recognizable matters—but it’s the experience that turns a brand into one customers choose again and again.
