The Monkey Shack

One of the marketing/branding blogs I check regularly is written by Seth Godin, who had this post today. I just had a conversation with a client about this very same thing yesterday, so I thought I'd re-post it here.

Sure, a logo should be a proper representation of who you are and who you want to be. But think about some of the logos out there for very successful brands, such as Google's crazy colors, Nike's swoosh, the McDonald's arches, BMW's circular Bavarian flag. The designer's at work may kill me, but how you choose to position your company and how you deliver something unique and memorable for your consumers in infinitely more important than the graphic on your business card.

Your brand is not your logo

Freshfuel and the Dieline point to some new logos from big players.

Cluelessness on the half shell.

Smart marketers understand that a new logo can't possibly increase your market share, and they know that an expensive logo doesn't defeat a cheap logo. They realize that the logo is like a first name, it's an identifier.Pepsi

So, when Pepsi and BestBuy start 'testing' logos, and proclaiming that a new logo might change their market share, I get nervous. You can't test a logo any more than you can test a first name. Sure, you can eliminate Myxlplyx as an outlier, but given the success of the Starbucks mermaid and the Dunkin Donuts typeface (two outliers) you can see that this testing is sort of meaningless.

I guess the punchline is: take the time and money and effort you'd put into an expensive logo and put them into creating a product and experience and story that people remember instead.