A great-looking logo is the centerpiece of any serious marketing plan. Often
the first thing prospective customers or business partners see, your logo gives
them an immediate impression of your company and its values.
If your logo is clean and professional, the viewer is likely to assume your
business is successful. Logos that are poorly designed or hard-to-read reflect
negatively on the business, even if it’s thriving.
At its most basic, logo design involves combining letters, numbers and
pictographic icons (like the CBS eye, for example) into a distinctive mark. In
some cases the logo will include an original illustration, as with Ben &
Jerry’s® Holsteins or the Starbucks® siren.
The first goal of good logo design is to create a memorable mark that
is unlike any other currently used in its market. The best logo designers also
try to capture the essence of the product or service in the logo, or key in on a
single feature or detail of corporate history. Expect to pay anywhere from
hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a complete multi-channel
roll-out of a new logo.
Once you have a logo you’re happy with, use it consistently on all your
marketing materials -- business cards, letterhead, Web site, emails, signage,
billboards and ads. Changing your logo from one use to the next will only
confuse the viewing public. But if used consistently, viewers will come to
associate your company – and only your company – with that particular
mark. They won’t even need to read the text in the email or ad to know what
you’re selling. As soon as they see your logo, they’ll know what’s coming.
This is not to say that good logos never change. Some of the most successful
brands have revised their logos over the years to keep pace with changing visual
sensibilities. The first Apple logo wasn’t an apple at all, and the sleek silver
apple in current use was rainbow-colored until 1998. The Canon® camera company
logo – which has been entirely typographic since 1956 – initially included an
image of a thousand-armed Buddhist deity when it was created in 1934.
But the strongest logos tend to be subtle with their reincarnations. Over the
course of its 120- year history, the IBM® logo has almost always consisted
entirely of letters. The last three iterations of this widely recognized logo
went from outline letters in 1947 to solid black in 1956 to those distinctive
blue pinstripes starting in 1972. One look at those three letters tells you
everything you need to know.
