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| ... | Are You Getting Enough Brand in Your Diet? How Important is Your Logo? If you are ignoring branding you are doing your company a great disservice. A carefully planned branding strategy is a significant component of any marketing plan. With that in mind let's talk about a key ingredient in your branding - Your logo. Although developing an effective brand is about much more than a logo design, your logo should be the cornerstone of that brand. Your logo is a big part of your company's identity. It will receive more visibility than any other bit of information connected to your company. It will appear on every piece of literature every package, on your website, business cards, letterhead advertisements, t-shirts, signs .everything - and if it's not what are you waiting for. What does your logo say about your company? Think of your logo as your company's ID. Your personal ID card says a lot about you as a person, your age, your height, your hair color, your restrictions, etc. As well your logo should say something about the personality of your company. For example, the company culture at Google is very open and fun and innovative and their logo reflects that image. The font is a loose Serif-style font; the leading is wide and open. There are no hard edges on the logo and although the logo never changes they do fun things with the logo. On significant dates notice at Google they'll do things to the logo that will represent what is happening at that particular holiday or event. At Christmas you'll see Christmas trimmings around the logo and on Vincent van Gogh's anniversary they've created their own version of Starry Night using the Google logo. On the other end of the spectrum is the IBM logo which is very rigid and simplistic and this represents the company's blue-chip corporate persona. Many companies allocate significant resources in creating a new logo identity for their company. They'll research color pallets, fonts and symbols. It may take months before they decide on any ideas after focus groups and surveys and multiple levels of approval within the company. This approach isn't suitable for every company. You may have a small base or mom-and-pop-type company and you won't have the resources for this type of undertaking but your logo will still perform the same functions as it does for a larger company and you don't want to take it any less seriously. Just as a larger company puts their logo on everything they present to the public, you'll be doing the same thing. Plenty of websites out there offer logo designs at bargain basement pricing. They may promise you that up to five different designers will be working on your design. These companies generally have a staff of designers working in a production environment and they produce dozens of designs every day. Keep this in mind: If someone is pumping out a dozen logo designs every day, how much thought do you think they are going to put into designing your logo? Not much.They're not putting any time or thought into your logo design; they're objective is to pump out designs quickly. They generally pick images from huge clip art libraries so there's a high probability that you may end up with a logo that looks very similar to one they did for another company several days ago... You may modify your advertising campaign from year to year but your logo should always remain a constant. If you are aggressive enough with your marketing, people will begin to identify your company by your logo. This doesn't happen overnight but it will happen over time. Just as your company will develop a personality and its own internal culture, your logo to some degree will represent that identity. It's not just about having a pretty eye-catching design. And now to answer the question - How important is your logo? VERY! About the author: To link to this article copy the following code and paste into the html of your webpage:
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