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With your letterhead and business card, you first begin to build relationships with the people who will make your business a success. With a little creativity, you can turn these run of the mill materials into the kind of marketing tools that keep the mill running.
Establish your identity. Use the graphics and text on your letterhead and business cards to show and tell customers who you are. Because they will accompany many of your other materials, keep them as clean and simple as possible.
Create a logoless logo. If you don’t have the budget for a custom logo, try representing the idea behind your business with a combination of two simple clip art symbols. Here, the sun and snowflake symbols represent hot and cold for a heating and air conditioning contractor.
Include a "benefits" tag line. A statement that explains what you do and how it benefits your customer keeps your business card working for you long after your first contact.
Turn your business card into a mini-brochure. Its simple, just add a headline and brief text to the other business card basics—your name, title, organization, phone, fax, office hours, and your on-line and mailing address.
Limit the number of fonts. Too many fonts make your materials visually confusing. The general rule is: don’t use more than one serif font and one sans serif font family per document (serif fonts have "feet," sans serif fonts do not). Use bold, capitalized, and italicized text sparingly and it will have a more pronounced effect when you do.
Break the stranger barrier. A personal letter and a follow-up telephone call is a potent combination. By the time you have asked the person if they received and read your letter, you are no longer a stranger.
You wouldn’t dream of walking into the office of a potential customer and reading a litany of products, services, and prices. You introduce yourself, explore the customer’s needs, demonstrate how your product or service will meet those needs, and tell how you have produced results for others. Your brochure should do the same.
Don’t bury the benefits. No matter how compelling your message, few people will read every word. Be sure to include your most important points in the places most often read—the headlines, subheads, and captions.
Create a clear call to action. Don’t be subtle about the action you want the reader to take—invite them to place an order, attend an event, call for a consultation, etc.
Don’t assume your brochure will close the sale. In many cases, a brochure is better used to position your company and to prepare the customer to be sold. Follow up with a visit or a phone call within one week.
Take a real-world view of work in progress. If your project will be folded—print it out and fold it to get a better feel for the final effect. Trim pages to size. Print your project on the paper you will use to reproduce it. These physical changes can dramatically effect the look of the final piece.
Connect your messages. Use your marketing materials in concert—include an offer of a free brochure in your newsletter and vice versa. If you have them, include your fax back phone number and web site address in all your print materials and offer your print materials on-line.
Graduate to high resolution. If you plan to have your brochure reproduced on a commercial printing press, rather than printing the finished project on a laser printer, have it output to a high-resolution imagesetter (at 1200 dots per inch or higher). Your final brochure will be far more sharp and clear. Many commercial printers offer this service or can direct you to someone who does.
Mail it, hand it out, hang it up, leave it wherever prospects congregate—a flyer, printed on one side of a letter-sized sheet, is among the least expensive, easiest to produce, and hardest working marketing tools.
Use photographs to tell your story. Show the benefit or the result of using your product or service in a photograph. You can scan your own photographs or buy stock photographs already in electronic form.
Use a delicate hand. People new to design tend to make text and graphics too big and/or too bold. Keep your layout simple. Limit yourself to two typefaces to minimize the visual confusion. Use illustrations that build on your message.
Don’t make unrealistic claims. Nothing turns off prospects quicker. Be enthusiastic, tell your story in a positive light, but don’t expect people to believe statements you would not believe yourself.
Organize your page with boxes and borders. You can include several different levels of information on a single page by enclosing separate material in a box or border.
Establish a center of attention. Decide which idea or image is most important on the page and make it the single most dominant visual element by playing up its size, position, or density.
Stick with it. Its easy to get bored with your marketing message and your visual identity. If your story is clearly and effectively told, don’t change it for change’s sake. To a new prospect, it is every bit as fresh as the first day you created it. To repeat customers, your message becomes increasingly familiar and secure in their minds.
Illustration is more than ornamentation. At a minimum, a picture or graphic image should grab attention and draw your reader into the message. At its best, it will express something words can’t.
Good design doesn’t have to be complicated. This is a simple design using two typefaces. The illustrations are from a clip art collection. The final artwork is printed in black and white on rich-looking paper.
On one thing, the experts agree—follow-up is the single most important and least used marketing strategy. A promotional newsletter featuring trade news, customer success stories, and information about your products or services is an excellent way to establish and grow your relationship with customers.
Include meaningful information. Supplement promotional stories with a question and answers column, trends and statistics, how-to features, and technical advice.
Build on existing design ideas. If you don’t have the time or desire to create your own design use a template or borrow from an existing layout. This newsletter uses a nameplate, section headings, and the text size and style typically found in a full-sized newspaper.
Involve your audience. Ask for letters to the editor and story ideas, include a clip & return questionnaire, offer special pricing and coupons, a calendar of events, and plenty of alternatives for making contact—your phone and fax numbers and your mailing and on-line addresses.
State your mission. Add a tag line that explains who you are and what you do. Your publication will undoubtedly be passed on to the colleagues of readers who don’t know you—a valuable source of new prospects.
A dollar saved is a dollar earned. Check into bulk mailing rates and requirements, eliminate the need for an envelope by including space for a mailing label, use one or two colors instead of four.
Use customers names and faces. Most people love to see their names, their ideas, and their pictures in print. Include stories about, and letters from, satisfied customers but be sure to get permission before you publish.
Keep it simple. Good design makes your message more easily understood. Meaningless graphics, difficult to read text, too many fonts and visual elements on a page get between the reader and your message.
A brochure is an unbound booklet (that is, without a hard cover or binding). It may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths (called a leaflet), or it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and stapled at the crease to make a simple book. Librarians consider a brochure to be any paperback book with 49 pages or less, that is not aimed at children.
brochures can contain anything from information on kitchen appliances to medical information to religious treatises. brochures are very important in marketing as they are cheap to produce and can be distributed easily to customers. brochures have also long been an important tool of political protest and political campaigning for similar reasons.
The storage of individual brochures requires special consideration because they can be easily crushed or torn when shelved alongside hardcover books. For this reason, they should either be kept in file folders in a file cabinet, or kept in boxes that have approximately the dimensions of a hardcover book and placed vertically on a shelf.
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Awareness The percentage of population or target market who are aware of the existence of a given brand or company. There are two types of awareness: spontaneous, which measures the percentage of people who spontaneously mention a particular brand when asked to name brands in a certain category; and prompted, which measures the percentage of people who recognise a brand from a particular category when shown a list.
Brand A brand is a mixture of attributes, tangible and intangible, symbolised in a trademark, which, if managed properly, creates value and influence.
"Value" has different interpretations: from a marketing or consumer perspective it is "the promise and delivery of an experience"; from a business perspective it is "the security of future earnings"; from a legal perspective it is "a separable piece of intellectual property." Brands offer customers a means to choose and enable recognition within cluttered markets.
Brand Architecture How an organization structures and names the brands within its portfolio. There are three main types of brand architecture system: monolithic, where the corporate name is used on all products and services offered by the company; endorsed, where all sub-brands are linked to the corporate brand by means of either a verbal or visual endorsement; and freestanding, where the corporate brand operates merely as a holding company, and each product or service is individually branded for its target market.
Brand Associations The feelings, beliefs and knowledge that consumers (customers) have about brands. These associations are derived as a result of experiences and must be consistent with the brand positioning and the basis of differentiation.
Brand Commitment The degree to which a customer is committed to a given brand in that they are likely to re-purchase/re-use in the future. The level of commitment indicates the degree to which a brand's customer franchise is protected form competitors.
Brand Earnings The share of a brand-owning business's cashflow that can be attributed to the brand alone.
Brand Equity The sum of all distinguishing qualities of a brand, drawn from all relevant stakeholders, that results in personal commitment to and demand for the brand; these differentiating thoughts and feelings make the brand valued and valuable.
Brand Equity Protection Is the implementation of strategies to reduce risk and liability from the effects attributable to counterfeiting, diversion, tampering and theft so that the differentiating thoughts and feelings about the brand are maintained and remain valued and valuable.
Brand Essence The brand's promise expressed in the simplest, most single-minded terms. For example, Volvo = safety; AA = Fourth Emergency Service. The most powerful brand essences are rooted in a fundamental customer need.
Brand Experience The means by which a brand is created in the mind of a stakeholder. Some experiences are controlled such as retail environments, advertising, products/services, websites, etc. Some are uncontrolled like journalistic comment and word of mouth. Strong brands arise from consistent experiences which combine to form a clear, differentiated overall brand experience.
Brand Extension Leveraging the values of the brand to take the brand into new markets/sectors.
Brand Harmonisation Ensuring that all products in a particular brand range have a consistent name, visual identity and, ideally, positioning across a number of geographic or product/service markets.
Brand Identity The outward expression of the brand, including its name and visual appearance. The brand's identity is its fundamental means of consumer recognition and symbolizes the brand's differentiation from competitors.
Brand Image The customer's net "out-take" from the brand. For users this is based on practical experience of the product or service concerned (informed impressions) and how well this meets expectations; for non-users it is based almost entirely upon uninformed impressions, attitudes and beliefs.
Brand Licensing The leasing by a brand owner of the use of a brand to another company. Usually a licensing fee or royalty rate will be agreed for the use of the brand.
Brand Management Practically this involves managing the tangible and intangible aspects of the brand. For product brands the tangibles are the product itself, the packaging, the price, etc. For service brands (see Service Brands), the tangibles are to do with the customer experience - the retail environment, interface with salespeople, overall satisfaction, etc. For product, service and corporate brands, the intangibles are the same and refer to the emotional connections derived as a result of experience, identity, communication and people. Intangibles are therefore managed via the manipulation of identity, communication and people skills.
Brand Mission See Brand Platform.
Brand Parity A measure of how similar, or different, different brands in the same category are perceived to be. Brand parity varies widely from one category to another. It is high for petrol, for example: about 80% of respondents (BBDO survey) see no real difference between brands. By contrast, brand parity for cars is low: only about 25% of respondents say that one make is much the same as another.
Brand Personality The attribution of human personality traits (seriousness, warmth, imagination, etc.) to a brand as a way to achieve differentiation. Usually done through long-term above-the-line advertising and appropriate packaging and graphics. These traits inform brand behavior through both prepared communication/packaging, etc., and through the people who represent the brand - its employees.
Brand Platform The Brand Platform consists of the following elements:
o Brand Vision The brand's guiding insight into its world.
o Brand Mission How the brand will act on its insight.
o Brand Values The code by which the brand lives. The brand values act as a benchmark to measure behaviors and performance.
o Brand Personality The brand's personality traits (See also definition for Brand Personality).
o Brand Tone of Voice How the brand speaks to its audiences.
Brand Positioning The distinctive position that a brand adopts in its competitive environment to ensure that individuals in its target market can tell the brand apart from others. Positioning involves the careful manipulation of every element of the marketing mix.
Brand Strategy A plan for the systematic development of a brand to enable it to meet its agreed objectives. The strategy should be rooted in the brand's vision and driven by the principles of differentiation and sustained consumer appeal. The brand strategy should influence the total operation of a business to ensure consistent brand behaviors and brand experiences.
Brand Tone of Voice See Brand Platform.
Brand Valuation The process of identifying and measuring the economic benefit - brand value - that derives from brand ownership.
Brand Values The code by which the brand lives. The brand values act as a benchmark to measure behaviors and performance. (See also Brand Platform.)
Brand Vision See Brand Platform.
Branding Selecting and blending tangible and intangible attributes to differentiate the product, service or corporation in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way.
Co-branding The use of two or more brand names in support of a new product, service or venture.
Consumer Product Goods (consumer goods) or services (consumer services) purchased for private use or for other members of the household.
Core Competencies Relates to a company's particular areas of skill and competence that best contribute to its ability to compete.
Corporate Identity At a minimum, is used to refer to the visual identity of a corporation (its logo, signage, etc.), but usually taken to mean an organization's presentation to its stakeholders and the means by which it differentiates itself from other organizations.
Counterfeiting When an organization or individual produces a product that looks like a branded product and is packaged and presented in a manner to deceive the purchaser.
Country of Origin The country from which a given product comes. Customers' attitudes to a product and their willingness to buy it tend to be heavily influenced by what they associate with the place where it was designed and manufactured.
Customer Characteristics All distinguishing, distinctive, typical or peculiar characteristics and circumstances or customers that can be used in market segmentation to tell one group of customers from another.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tracking customer behavior for the purpose of developing marketing and relationship-building processes that bond the consumer to the brand. Developing software or systems to provide one-to-one customer service and personal contact between the company and the customer.
Customer Service The way in which the brand meets its customers' needs via its various different channels (for example, over the telephone or Internet in the case of remote banking, or in person in the case of retail or entertainment).
Demographics The description of outward traits that characterize a group of people, such as age, sex, nationality, marital status, education, occupation or income. Decisions on market segmentation are often based on demographic data.
Differential Product Advantage A feature of a product that is valuable to customers and is not found in other products of the same category.
Differentiation Creation or demonstration of unique characteristics in a company's products or brands compared to those of its competitors.
Differentiator Any tangible or intangible characteristic that can be used to distinguish a product or a company from other products and companies.
Diversion When genuine product is sold to a buyer in one market/channel and then resold by the same buyer into another market/channel, without the consent or authority of the brand owner, to take advantage of a price arbitrage situation. Definition also applies to parallel trade, gray market or gray market activities.
Endorsed brand (See Brand Architecture.) Generally a product or service brand name that is supported by a masterbrand - either dominantly e.g. Tesco Metro or lightly e.g. Nestle Kit-Kat.
FMCG Fast moving consumer goods. An expression used to describe frequently purchased consumer items, such as foods, cleaning products and toiletries.
Focus Group A qualitative research technique in which a group of about eight people is invited to a neutral venue to discuss a given subject, for example hand-held power tools. The principle is the same as an in-depth interview, except that group dynamics help to make the discussion livelier and more wide-ranging. Qualitative groups enable the researcher to probe deeper into specific areas of interest (for example, the nature of commitment to a brand). The result adds richer texture to the understanding of broader data (for example, quantitative), which may paint general trends or observations. Also known as a group discussion.
Freestanding Brand (See Brand Architecture.) A brand name and identity used for a single product or service in a portfolio, which is unrelated to the names and identities of other products in the company's portfolio.
Functionality What a product does for the buyer and user; the utility it offers the user; what he or she can do with it.
Goods A product consisting predominantly of tangible values. Almost all goods, however, have intangible values to a greater or lesser extent.
Group Discussion See Focus Group.
High Technology (high tech) A term with vague and far-reaching meaning. This covers electronics, data technology, telecommunications, medical technology and bio-chemistry. In order to be classed as a high tech company, one definition is that at least 35 percent of staff should have a technical qualification, and at least 15 percent of sales should be used for R&D. Another definition states that the company must employ twice as many scientists and engineers and invest twice as much in R&D as the average of all manufacturing companies in the country.
Intangibles "Intangible" - incapable of being touched. (1) Intangible assets - trademarks, copyrights, patents, design rights, proprietary expertise, databases, etc. (2) Intangible brand attributes - brand names, logos, graphics, colors, shapes and smells. (See Service Brand.)
Launch The initial marketing of a new product in a particular market. The way in which the launch is carried out greatly affects the product's profitability throughout its lifecycle.
Market Leader A company that has achieved a dominant position - either in scale (e.g., British Airways) or influence (e.g., Virgin) - within its field. This leading position often comes about because the company was the first to market a certain type of product and, with the protection of a patent, has managed to consolidate its position before direct competition was possible. Alternatively, a company may overtake a previous market leader through greater efficiency and skilful positioning.
Market Position A measure of the position of a company or product on a market. Defined as market share multiplied by share of mind.
Market Segment A group of customers who (a) share the same needs and values, (b) can be expected to respond in much the same way to a company's offering, and (c) command enough purchasing power to be of strategic importance to the company.
Market Share A company's share of total sales of a given category of product on a given market. Can be expressed either in terms of volume (how many units sold) or value (the worth of units sold).
Mass Marketing Simultaneous standardized marketing to a very large target market through mass media. Other names for this are market aggregation and undifferentiated marketing.
Masterbrand A brand name that dominates all products or services in a range or across a business. Sometimes used with sub-brands, sometimes used with alpha or numeric signifiers. (See also Monolithic Brand.) Audi, Durex, Nescafe and Lego, for example, are all used as masterbrands.
Monolithic Brand A single brand name that is used to "masterbrand" all products or services in a range. Individual products are nearly always identified by alpha or numeric signifiers. Companies like Mercedes and BMW favor such systems.
Multibrand Strategy /Multiple Branding Marketing of two or more mutually competing products under different brand names by the same company. The motive may be that the company wishes to create internal competition to promote efficiency, or to differentiate its offering to different market segments, or to get maximum mileage out of established brands that it has acquired. When a company has achieved a dominant market share, multibrand strategy may be its only option for increasing sales still further without sacrificing profitability. For example, Lever Brothers sells washing powders under the Persil, Omo and Surf names; Cadbury sells chocolates under the Dairy Milk, Bournville and Fruit & Nut names; Heinz sells canned convenience foods under the Baked Beans, Spaghetti Hoops and Alphabetti Spaghetti names.
Names There are three basic categories of brand (or corporate) name:
o Descriptive name A name which describes the product or service for which it is intended, e.g., TALKING PAGES.
o Associative name A name which alludes to an aspect or benefit of the product or service, often by means of an original or striking image or idea, e.g., VISA.
o Freestanding name A name which has no link to the product or service but which might have meaning of its own, e.g., PENGUIN.
The following are also helpful:
o Abstract name A name which is entirely invented and has no meaning of its own, e.g., ZENECA. Abstract names are a sub-set of freestanding names because they also have no link to the product of service.
o Coined name Any name which is in some way invented. Coined names can be descriptive (CO-CREATE), associative (IMATION) and freestanding/abstract (ZENECA).
Niche Marketing Marketing adapted to the needs, wishes and expectations of small, precisely defined groups of individuals. A form of market segmentation, but aimed at very small segments. Niche marketing characteristically uses selective media.
OEM market OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturers. The OEM market consists of companies that use another company's product as a component in their own production. A manufacturer of ball bearings, for example, sells both to OEM customers who build the bearings into machines, and to end users who need the bearings as spare parts for machines that they have bought from the OEMs. Most manufacturing companies thus have an OEM market and a replacement market. The latter is usually called the MRO market or aftermarket.
Offering What a company offers for sale to customers. An offering includes the product and its design, features, quality, packaging, distribution, etc., together with associated services such as financing, warranties and installation. The name and brand of the product are also part of the offering.
Packaging Design The design of the pack format and graphics for a product brand.
Parent Brand A brand that acts as an endorsement to one or more sub-brands within a range.
Passing Off The name given to a legal action brought to protect the "reputation" of a particular trademark/brand/get up. In essence, the action is designed to prevent others from trading on the reputation/goodwill of an existing trademark/brand/get up. The action is only available in those countries that recognize unregistered trademark rights (for example the UK and US). In some countries, it is called "unfair competition action."
Perceptual Mapping Graphic Analysis and presentation of where actual and potential customers place a product or supplier in relation to other products and suppliers. Most perceptual maps show only two dimensions at a time, for example price on one axis and quality on the other. There also are methods of graphically analyzing and presenting measurement data in three or more dimensions.
Positioning Statement A written description of the position that a company wishes itself, its product or its brand to occupy in the minds of a defined target audience.
Power Branding A strategy in which every product in a company's range has its own brand name which functions independently, unsupported by either the company's corporate brand or its other product brands. Power branding is a resource-intensive strategy, since each brand must be commercially promoted and legally protected. This strategy is used mainly by manufacturers of consumer goods. Lever's and Procter & Gamble's detergents are good examples of power brands.
Product Brand A brand which is synonymous with a particular product offering, for example, Cheerios.
Rebrand When a brand owner revisits the brand with the purpose of updating or revising based on internal or external circumstances. Rebranding is often necessary after an M&A or if the brand has outgrown its identity/marketplace.
Relative Market Share Your own company's market share compared to those of your competitors. A large share confers advantages of scale in product development, manufacturing and marketing. It also puts you in a stronger position in the minds of customers, which has a positive influence on pricing.
Relaunch Reintroducing a product into a specific market. The term implies that the company has previously marketed the product but stopped marketing it. A relaunched product has usually undergone one or more changes. It may, for example, be technically modified, rebranded, distributed through different channels or repositioned.
Repositioning Communications activities to give an existing product a new position in customers' minds and so expanding or otherwise altering its potential market. Many potentially valuable products lead an obscure existence because they were launched or positioned in an inadequate manner. It is almost always possible to enhance the value of such products by repositioning them.
Rollout The process by which a company introduces a new product or service to different geographical markets or consumer segments.
Selective Media Media that, unlike mass media, reach only small and identifiable groups of people, for example, members of a particular profession or industry or other groups defined by geographic, demographic or psychographic data (otherwise known as targeted media).
Service Brand A product consisting predominantly of intangible values. "A service is something that you can buy and sell, but not drop on your foot" (The Economist). In this sense, a service is something that you do for somebody, or a promise that you make to them.
Share of Mind There are many definitions of share of mind. At its most precise, share of mind measures how often consumers think about a particular brand as a percentage of all the times they think about all the brands in its category. More loosely, share of mind can be defined simply as positive perceptions of the brand obtained by market research. Whereas market share measures the width of a company's market position, share of mind can be said to measure its depth.
Share of Voice The media spending of a particular brand when compared to others in its category.
Sub-brand A product or service brand that had its own name and visual identity to differentiate it from the parent brand.
Tangibles "Tangible" - capable of being touched. (1) Tangible assets - manufacturing plant, bricks and mortar, cash, investments, etc. (2) Tangible brand attributes - the product and its packaging. (3) Tangible brand values - useful qualities of the brand known to exist through experience and knowledge.
Target Market The market segment or group of customers that a company has decided to serve, and at which it consequently aims its marketing activities.
Top-of-Mind What is present in the uppermost level of consciousness; the manufacturer or brand that people in market surveys name first when asked to list products in a specific category. Top-of-mind is the highest degree of share of mind. To attain that position, a company normally needs to have a large share of voice in its category.
Trademark "Any sign capable of being represented graphically which is capable of distinguishing goods or services of one undertaking from those of another undertaking" (UK Trade Marks Act 1994).
Trademark Infringement A trademark registration is infringed by the unauthorized use of the registered trademark, or of one that is confusingly similar to it, on the registered goods or services, or in certain circumstances on similar or dissimilar goods and services.
Trendsetter Someone or thing that breaks a traditional mold or routine and gains a following because of it. iMac is an example of trendsetting in design as now office supplies come in the familiar colors and translucent packaging of an iMac.
User Segmentation Division of potential customers into market segments according to how and for what purpose they use a product. Do they use it for cleaning their teeth or for making cakes (baking powder)? For oiling their hair or for frying food? (True story concerning use of Brylcreem in Nigeria). As a decongestant chest rub or as an aphrodisiac? (True story concerning Ribby Rub in Caribbean).
Visual Identity What a brand looks like - including, among other things, its logo, typography, packaging and literature systems.
Logotype, commonly know as a logo, is a design, a graphic representation/image/trademark symbolizing one's organization. Designed for instant identification, a logo can appear on company letterhead, advertising material and signs as an emblem by way of which the organization can easily be recognized.
Originating in the 19th century, after a surge in industrial manufacturing that led to an increase in output, global distribution, and the commencement of competition, logos were created to differentiate between products within the same industry. Emblems or symbols were included on products, packages and labels so buyers could easily recognize the product they preferred. Logos revolutionized the advertising world.
There was a time when only affluent organizations could afford their own crest, emblem or logo. They were, in some cases, a very detailed drawing with many objects. Cost was not an issue and more was considered better. Then, flags were used due to their larger format. They were visible from the craft fields and from long distances.
Today, successful companies continue to say that "simpler is better". Especially when the world is advancing so rapidly, you have less and less time to impress your customers. Logo designs, now, are very stylish yet remain conservative, which makes them eye-catching and easier for the brain to memorize.
Selecting the Logo Concept
The most crucial aspect of logo selection is the logo concept. You must first determine what your logo should say about your company. You may come up with an image related to a business like a house for real estate or a car for a car dealer, or your logo could be just an abstract image representing the company's philosophy, for example, a pyramid or a blocky image for a stable, trustworthy company. A very dynamic image with orbits and swooshes, sparks, or particles might be suitable for a very young, modern, high tech company.
Not all businesses, though, can be easily associated with any particular image. For example, a programming company doesn't have many images to associate with (except a computer). In this situation, it would be recommended to concentrate on an abstract image and to represent the feel of the company's business rather than coming up with a specific image. Companies that deal with more than one business should have a more generic image, but the logo can still be made to look technological by implementing some straight lines in combination with curves, or more corporate with more proportional, symmetrical, geometrical shapes.
As a result of the expense involved in changing a logo, a "good" logo shouldn't be too trendy, but ideally last many years before needing a redesign. You need to ask yourself if the design will be relevant in 5 or 10 years.
Once a company has established itself with a specific look, feel and image, it becomes more and more difficult to change as time goes by. Some companies have enjoyed success without ever having to change their logo design. Creating a logo that can appeal to customers and consumers throughout the ages is important, considering that there will always be a risk involved with change.
If, however, you decide that your logo is in need of a face life, here are some points to take into consideration:
Does your current logo represent 3 of the key elements that make up a credible and high quality logo design?
1 Does the logo portray your company in a manner which says that you are an expert in this field?
2 Is the logo "contemporary", symbolizing a "forward-thinking" look?
3 Is the message that you are trying to convey to the consumer clear? If you answered 'yes' to all of these questions, then why change your logo? By revamping your company image, you may risk losing your supporters, clients that are already familiar with your products and services, your popularity, respect, as well as your market share. You can, however, clean-up your logo or update it with a lot less risk.
Tagline
When creating a tagline for your company, it is important to consider whether or not you are going to, eventually, go global. If so, create a tagline that gets your point across when translated into different languages. Here are some examples of successful companies that did not take this into consideration:
Shapes, Sizes and Types
Iconic logos: Iconic logos, one of the most common types, are represented by a single graphical element, icon or design which usually includes the company name below or to the side of the icon, for example: Nike, AOL, Micheline. When considering iconic logos, it is important to make the symbol fit any of the geometrical shapes. The best shapes to use are symmetrical geometrical shapes. They can be placed almost anywhere and still show balance and are very easy to handle.
There is no obligation as to the kind of shape used, you can use any free form shape you want, but you have to be very careful with the placement, so the logo doesn't look like it is falling apart:
When selecting the shape, you should consider how conservative and stable your company wishes to appear.
Logo Type: Logo types consist only of the company name. A unique font or unique layout style can make a great logo
Illustrative: An illustrative logo consists of a unique design; usually representing the company's field of business. These logos are often very eye-catching, detailed and impressive. As a result of their detail and colors, illustrative logos are difficult to reproduce and therefore expensive.
Integrated: An integrated logo is the combination of a logo type and illustrative logo. These logos are even more rare than the illustrative logos because of their expense.
Less is More!
Everyone wants a cutting edge, high tech, 'cool' logo. Consider, however, that some of the most successful logos are simple, and most importantly, easy to remember. Think of These are all very successful images that are, at the same time, very simple. When creating your design, you can get into picky little details and it is important to take a step back, close your eyes and see if you can essentially sketch the image in your head. If it is that memorable, then you know you are on the right track. Remember that "less is more".
Colors
Keep in mind, when selecting colors for your logo, that your color scheme should be appropriate for your company. It is also useful to use pantone colors -universal colors which are used by professional print shops. Colors often have a profound impact on viewers. Red and orange are said to produce excitation, red also tends to signify danger. Dark blue portrays comfort and relaxation, and yellow tends to create a feeling of irritation. If you are creating a logo design for a nursing home or a hospital, it may be a good idea to stay away from reds and bright yellows. Exceptions are always made though, such (which has both red and yellow in its logo!). When choosing your color scheme, keep in mind the personality you wish to express for your business. Do you want your company to portray a professional image? Try using black, silver, and other dark colors. Do you want your company to come across and fun, dynamic, and funky? If so, try using bright and vibrant colors. Be creative.
Important Points To Consider:
o logo should:
_ Attract attention and leave an impression
_ Create a look that in unique
_ reflect the personality of the company
o Reproduction costs: The more detailed and colorful the logo design, the more difficult to reproduce, meaning a higher cost.
o The size: The prefect logo design will look great on a sign board as well as on a business card or a pen.
o Logo design companies are by the dozen. Take your time, research different companies and designers and compare packages in order to select a logo design company suited to your needs.
o Check your competition. What designs, graphics, and colors do they use? Remember that you need to be competitive.
o Trademark your logo. If your logo is trademarked, this prevents competitors and other third parties from stealing it.
o And last but not least, when in doubt, K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid).
Logo design is believed to be one of the most difficult areas in graphic design. A logo is essentially at the heart of a corporate identity. It is the face of an organization! The right logo design can be one of your strongest marketing tools. It delivers the message to the public that a company is unique, credible and professional. Make it stylish. Make it elegant. Make it an impact.