Branding

One Way to Do Branding Badly

Time for more about branding, one of my favorite subjects. This time we’re hearing from the Pet Peeve Department.

As Design Deli’s faithful readers know, branding is the sum of all contacts and impressions an audience has with a company or organization.

A brand embodies the promises that a company makes to its market in terms of what to expect from it. These promises are communicated symbolically in the brand’s visual identity. If purposeful decisions are not made in creating and managing a brand, a vacuum forms which the company’s audience will fill with whatever assumptions come to mind. These haphazard perceptions are rarely to the company’s benefit.

An amateurish, poorly conceived brand identity presents its owner as unprofessional and does not inspire confidence. In fact, it creates the opposite, to the detriment of its owner.

One way to ensure that your brand identity will be at best ineffective, and at worst negative marketing, is to hold a logo contest.

Logo contests are to brands as FSBOs (For Sale By Owner) are to home sales. Like representing yourself in court, they are always a bad idea. Logo contests are usually undertaken to save money and to “get the community involved.” That makes as much sense as having a contest to see who gets to do your taxes or take out your tonsils. Design is a profession, not an artsy hobby.

Logos are strategic tools that support business and organizational goals. A cute little graphic cannot perform the functions of a thoughtfully developed symbol in communicating the promise of what your market wants from you. Here are three reasons why logo contests are a sure fail:

Developing an effective logo requires a lot of effort on the part of the client as well as the designer. Without a fully engaged client, the designer is working in a vacuum. Since there is little or no designer-client interaction in a logo contest, results are doomed because the best work happens when a trained designer and a thoughtful, engaged client function together as a team. That doesn’t happen in a logo contest.
Contests attract non-professionals who have no clue about the function of logos, their role in branding or the process by which visual branding is developed.
Contests are also exploitative. They ask a lot of people to work for nothing on the chance of maybe winning a prize. This disrespects everyone involved.

In the long run, contests are more expensive than a professional process because the results are rarely useable or applicable across all media. Entries are often thinly disguised rip-offs of others’ work, especially in on-line contests. This can raise unpleasant copyright issues.

Cost is not the highest measure of effectiveness or worth. Logo contests may seem cheap, but the most expensive logo is the one that doesn’t do its job.

Getting It Right: Why Brand Strategy Always Precedes Logo Design

In the last issue of Design Deli, we looked at how the function of a logo is to represent your brand in a visual way, but is not the brand itself, just as a map is not the actual terrain it depicts.

In order to create a successful logo, it is important to have a workable brand definition in hand at the onset of the project, or develop one. In the last several years, branding has become a signature service offered by many design firms. Since the function of design is to inspire desired behaviors in the client’s audience, an experienced designer should be well positioned to assist in brand development.

This is a strategic process with specific outcomes. It is not the same thing as design development, which should always be driven by brand strategy. James McNamara, a noted arts branding expert, lists the following as the basics:

Identification of, and recommendations to resolve, an organization’s major communications issues (e.g. misperceptions to correct, new ideas to communicate, organizational issues that need to be rectified to ensure effective communications).
Identification and analysis of the audiences with whom you want to communicate.
A Position Statement focusing people internally on how to think about your organization that is used to inform critical organization messages and visual identity.
Key Image Attributes, almost personality traits, for your organization that need to be communicated via messages or visuals. These often suggest graphic identity development.
Primary and supplementary Organization Messages that always need to be communicated about your organization.

McNamara thinks that brand strategy and design strategy are both important, but that design should stem from branding. Your brand strategy should be a guide to how you want your business or organization to be perceived, and how to make basic decisions about how you convey your value, how you address your audience, and how you craft your messages to that audience.

After this thoughtful deliberation, you will be much better able to make productive decisions about your design and communications strategies. As a result, your choices will be more effective, and therefore truly support your business goals. Understanding what the job requires makes all the difference in choosing the right tools.

Brands & Logos: Two Different Animals

Over the years, I have created many logos for my clients. This is always a favorite assignment, and an area in which I’ve spent many years developing expertise. In designing these essential marketing tools, I have often noticed client confusion about the difference between a brand and a logo. This month’s Design Deli explains.

A brand is the sum of all the assumptions about and impressions made by a business or organization. It is always from your market’s viewpoint and is how you are positioned in your audience’s mind, based on all and any encounters it has had with your organization. These touch points can include:

Mission/vision
Building/premises/facilities
Customer relations and service
Public relations and news about the organization
Community involvement
Communications of any kind
Actual and virtual word-of-mouth
Name and visual identity (logo)
Digital and print advertising
Social media
Any point at which any member of your audience comes in contact with your organization.

This list was adapted from an article by James M. McNamara of Arts Branding, who defines it this way: Branding is the practice of aligning all those impressions to ensure that they form a consistent, unified image and message that will differentiate an organization or business from its competition. Brand perceptions should be managed to inspire purchasing decisions in a business’s favor, and monitored to ensure accuracy.

A logo is the tip of the iceberg of branding, says McNamara. It’s the small percent that shows above the waterline. Logos are part of an overall branding program and often the most visible component, but a brand and branding encompass all the components listed above.

As part of that list, the function of a logo is to represent your brand in a visual way – it’s a symbol. As such it has to be an accurate reflection of the values and value of your brand, but it is not the brand itself, just as a map is not the actual terrain it depicts.

In order to create a successful logo, it is important to have a workable brand definition in hand at the onset of the project. In the last several years, branding has become a signature service offered by many design firms. Since the function of design is to inspire desired decisions and behavior in the designated audience, designers are well positioned to assist clients in brand development. It is a strategic process with specific outcomes. It must always express the value of the brand it represents.

Branding

Think your logo needs a do-over?