Having spent roughly two weeks on coming up with the perfect story and identity behind our team, I can say with almost point blank conviction that Logos are far too underrated. Let us concoct the story this way: your business cycle and your processes are optimized, your clients are excessively happy and you are receiving a few new offers for increasing the budget on development and marketing however your company’s name is still hidden in the clouds. That’s an entrepreneurial nightmare and it’s all ingrained in one practice which the business overlooked whilst developing. The essential of branding is nothing but self promotion and its effectiveness depends upon the subtlety of your campaign.
This is where the logo becomes all important. Logo is a summation if I want to go scientific and it puts together everything that your business wants to say about itself and communicates it to the visitor/ watcher. It sounds more like how the logo can brandish every little moment of history that your business might have which makes it an effective storytelling mechanism. Now if you are paying attention, that gives two sides to it: the attention grabbing aspect and the story telling aspect. Businesses falter because they misjudge what they want to accomplish in their logo so their logo ceases to have the kind of pull that it should.
But why Branding?
Because branding is all about story telling. There are too many examples currently running amok but if you look at businesses running high, they all have a story that is easily relatable. The tactic of story telling for branding has been running for a long time. In fact it has resurfaced itself as an alternative to logos recently. One of the most recent examples to this can be seen with Lego who have branded themselves in too many manners. Their identity lies now as an alternative world in which they tell stories befitting of anything. Another example I can think of can be the Coca Cola brand that has resurfaced its share by creating quality ads about refreshment and the simpler pleasures in life.
If you analyze this closely, neither of these have much memorable value as logos themselves. I certainly cannot remember Lego’s logo but I do remember how much it has ventured. Conversely, I remember logos of Apple or that of Subway. Are those two strange names to mention in one sentence? Maybe but they both show how they have done their job rather well.
Storytelling
Apple tells what is all about with the insignia of a bitten off apple. What does it show? It shows ease, simplicity and friendliness like taking a bite off an apple. It’s not a story per se, but it communicates everything that the passerby or the visitor needs to know about Apple’s philosophy. This is where you can fully attribute that logos in fact do carry a lot of power.
This does not mean that the logos need to replace the story telling mechanism completely. For those who feel that they can achieve a good branding without a memorable logo is up to their way of going about their promotion strategy.
Attention
This one is easier to understand because a lot of businesses imagine this to be easier to execute. The first step is grabbing the attention via an inventive approach to the design and the next is to convert that interested visitor also known as a lead into an interested buyer. It ends up being difficult because many gloss over the detail that you need to put in a thought provoking design. Even if they manage to have an excellent content strategy, the design aspect is where the attention grabbing actually begins.
This can stem over to promotion of causes too which can easily be ingrained in the design of a few products. Causes of course go the extra mileage as they integrate an aspect that is actually being a cause for social good. In similar manner there are various things which can be included to enhance the attention grabbing aspect a logo can carry.
So why is it Key?
Branding at the end of the day is focused solely upon the memorability of the business. You carve out an identity and ensure that people remember everything about it. Any aspect or technique that I mention here is a principle of how digital marketing itself works in the long run. Logos have one thing that makes them exceedingly unique though: they immortalize the brand. Your stories might become forgotten with due time but the logo can forever embellish the grounds you carved as brand in any kind of market and that is the overarching reason why you need a good logo to gain ground as a reputable brand.
