 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Our Logo Options | Buying A Logo | Submit Project | Logo Design Network | Client FAQ | Contact Us | Design Tips | Free Stuff |
Do you even need a logo? 10 question to help you decide. Before you delve into the sometimes daunting task of having a logo designed, it’s probably a good idea to take a few minutes and decide whether or not you actually need one in the first place. Some will tell you that having a great logo is an absolute necessity. They might even go on to tell you that “The very survival of your business depends on it”. While many of their arguments may be valid, their point-of-view - especially if they're a designer - is not without some self-interest bias. Not that there’s anything basically wrong with this position - it's a pretty safe bet that no business ever suffered because of a good logo. Some might have suffered because of a bad one. At the very least, an effective mark is a worthwhile as a “what harm can it do” investment. It is, however, true that not every small business or company needs a logo. Asking yourself “why do I need a logo” is perhaps the most critical step to branding your company. By figuring that out, you can save yourself some time and unnecessary frustration - an inherent component of the logo design process itself. How can you tell if you need a company logo? While there’s no cut-and-dry ‘rules’, we’ve managed to distill the main reasons for designing a logo into ten salient questions. By answering them honestly, it might be a little easier to decide one way or the other. Ready? Let’s take a look; 1): What are the time-delinated goals of your company, product or service that you're developing and thinking of branding - is this a long term business plan that will require returning customers and the necessary brand loyalty for its success? 2): Are you going to be competing for the attention of prospective clients and customers in a crowded marketplace, against other already-established companies who’ve already built a substantial client base and developed a considerable market penetration? 3): Will you be entering an already competitive market segment and – let’s not be coy here – attempting to ‘steal’ business and customers away from other, more established companies as mentioned in question #3? 4): Do you need to get people’s attention quickly – the “here I am, and here’s what I do” kind of attention? Let's ask this in a different way. Are you going to rely on advertising and marketing to get the ‘word’ out to potential customers who've never heard about you or your company? 5): Do already have some rudimentary marketing, advertising and promotional devices in place - newsletters, a website, ads in the local paper? If so, could they be 'spiffed up' for added impact? 6): Do you already have some unused logo real-estate already set aside and just waiting to be utilized? You might have, for example, a company car or a bare storefront, potential advertising platforms where a logo might diligently advertise your company without the involvement of any appreciable costs, save initial design development. 7): Could your business benefit from some marketing using hard-goods? Would you like to offer premium giveaways such as mugs, pens or desktop calendars? Do you or your staff interact with potential, or established, customers, and would staff-shirts, baseball caps or other marketing trinkets help develop brand awareness? 8): Does part of your business plan involve networking or does it lean more towards ‘cold-calling’? In either case, these marketing tactics involve the distribution of your business cards as an initial way of introducing yourself to your market or to potential customers on a one-on-one basis. If you're cold-calling, your business material needs to have a little more 'oomph'. 9): Do you plan to advertise your business or products to a far reaching market? Your market can be viewed in terms of a sliding scale - friends and family on one end, through town and state-wide, to national and even global on the other. The requirement for a representative logo will increase exponentially as your planned market gets bigger. 10): Do people that you consider your direct competition boast a decent logo and marketing materials? What about the companies you admire and would like to emulate? If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, then you’ll probably need a logo and everything that comes with it. More than three and I'd argue that a logo and the surrounding support material will probably be crucial to growing your business past a few sales here-and-there. On the other hand, if you’re working for ‘the man’ during the day, only moonlighting to a few friends at night – say, accounting services come tax time, or selling trinkets on eBay from your basement - then you probably don’t need a logo. The reward vs. investment ratio makes the cost and time involved in creating a brand prohibitive. As much as we’d like to tell you that everyone needs a logo, it’s probably more ‘bang’ than what you need for the expectations you have, and the goals you have set. If you answered in the affirmative to several of our ‘do I need a logo’ questions, your business aspirations involve developing your business further and more investigation is in order. Here's another litmus test - if you’re planning to develop some brochures, a website or maybe even an advertisement in the local paper - you might need a logo. That’s still a ‘might’. Bulletin boards at the corner supermarket are full of hand-posted ‘adverts’ – you’ll recognize them by the tiny ‘pull off' strips with phone numbers, and while these advertisements might be more noticeable with a decent logo, they probably perform adequately for the level of return that is desired – a trickle of inquires, a couple of solid leads and one or two actual sales. If that’s within your goals, then a full-blown identity workup is still more than what you need. Let's say you want to take your marketing to a whole new level. You’re thinking about dropping a few hundred (or thousand) dollars on an ad in the local paper's marketplace section, or in a magazine page with a load of other ads, then yours better stand out (generally speaking, classified ads still enjoy the ‘no logo needed’ status). Sure, your deals are better. Yes, your service is faster. You’re even a nice person. But if people don’t notice your ad, what difference does any of it make? You can think of the ‘if a tree falls in the forest’ and ‘the sound of one hand clapping’ scenarios. And that's where a great logo really shines - grabbing people's attention, the very essence of any successful advertisement campaign. It's been said that an advertisement needs to be seen three times before people a) react and b) remember it. If you're using a logo consistently throughout your advertising, it helps potential customers realize that they've 'seen this before'. The same can be said of your website. Think about your own internet surfing 'experiences', You’ve been looking to buy some widget or trinket on the Internet. You’ve run into websites the exact widget you’re looking for, but for one reason or another, you decided to look at other websites. Granted, there are times that you may have been turned off by the price, and looked for better pricing using a Google keyword search. But what about those times you backed out of a web site because the website wasn’t, for lack of a better word, ‘right’? Perhaps It didn’t ‘feel’ as professional as the website that ultimately earned your widget-buying business. Perhaps the website ‘felt’ a little sketchy - amateur graphics, spelling mistakes and a myriad of dysfunctional links. Chances are, the site probably featured a hideous logo. Admittedly, this is all pretty nebulous stuff that requires a lot of quotation marks to explain. You probably couldn’t even put your finger on it at the time. And that's just the point. If your fledgling company or service is poorly presented, your potential clients won't be able to put their finger on it either. They’ll just ‘feel’ that something’s not quite right and search elsewhere. In practical terms - you’ll lose the sale. Which brings us to yet another important part of this exercise - if you’re trying to sell you services to absolute strangers – you'll usually only have a few seconds to convince them that you offer exactly what they’re looking for. Accordingly, you need to think about branding your company with, at the very minimum, a decent logo. In a nutshell that’s what a good visual identity and the related branding is all about. Convincing perfect strangers that you are the best (or at least, very good) at what you do, or what you sell. Strangers you ask? Yep. Absolute strangers. Let’s take another example. For the sake of argument, let’s say your homemade strawberry jam was such a bona fide hit at family picnics you decided to sell it at the local farmer’s market. Set up a booth and starting hawking your tasty spread for a couple of dollars a jar. You could probably still get by without a logo on the lid, label or on the booth itself. Captive audience, word of mouth, returning customers and a limited production capacity - how big is that crock-pot really? - combine to render a full-blown logo less than critical. If you want to sell the very same jam off the shelf at your local supermarket, you'll definitely need a logo on the jar. Your product will be competing with other brands while sharing the same shelf-space, and your packaging is the only thing that will convince shoppers to pick up your jars as opposed to your competition. To be taken seriously by the folks deciding what brands of strawberry jam do, and don’t, make it onto the shelves of aisle ten, your company had better be boasting a fairlyy serious logo. To convince supermarket customers to put your product into their shopping cart, you'll require some attention grabbing graphics. Ultimately, a logo helps convince customers that you’re earnest about your business, as opposed to the ‘that’s cute’ image that served you so well at the previously mentioned farmer’s market. It’s a marketing war out there, and a great logo is a formidable weapon to add to your sales generation arsenal. While it’s true that not every company or business needs a logo, it's equally true that a decent visual identity is critical to the longevity and growth of others. By taking a long, hard look at what you want to accomplish with your entrepreneurial aspirations, you can decide which applies to you.
|
|