Welcome to the Compass Designs website, powered by Joomla 1.5! The goal of this new site is to be the place to bookmark if you are looking for quality Joomla templates, tutorials, news and tips.Your Logo is not your Brand
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When we talk to clients about their projects, we often seem to spend lots of time going into fine details of how their logo will appear on the website. I think that many of them directly associate their logo as their brand. You see this in lengthy branding manuals and resources spent trying to protect the logo/name legally.
In today's web base world, I think this philosophy is misguided, your logo and name are not your brand...
I was interested to see that I am not the only one that thinks this. I recently picked up "The Real Business of Web Design" by John Waters. He had a useful discussion about what he called Logomania saying "he was amazed at how much money was spent creating and protecting logos that don't really mean anything".
Logos were first meant to be symbols of trust. When you bought a coke from Coca-Cola, you trusted the product and the branding characteristics associated with it. This carried on with successes such as Nike and Starbucks. Their ads didn't even show their products, but rather tried to capture the attitude of the brand.
The web seems to have done something strange to branding. I wonder how many people focus purely on their name, domain or logo as their brand, but don't realize that their entire site is now their brand.
The website communicates the essence of the brand, its not a broadcast medium, its an interactive one. If you want to be associated with quality customer service, you can't have a static site, you need rich forums where customers can experience your brand 24 hours a day, regardless of geographical location.
A great example is Joomla itself. Ask people what they associated with community. This is what the brand of looks like.
So what should you do? How can you communicate your brand? You need to think of what characteristics you want associated with your identity and then create a web site where your visitors can experience them.
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fabs
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I am a bit into branding as i am currently working on my masters thesis on branding and developing strong brands. A capturing logo is one of the most important things of a strong brand! You mentioned them: Nike's dynamics represented by their logo, Coke inconfundable white on red wave with the big letters, Nestle with the caring motherly like bird and and and... brands are not created by logos- as far as that i totally agree, but when it comes to leave or buy decisions, the logo is the factor that makes the difference. Because all the emotions, that were created by a campaign, by a company, a website or whatever are finally asscociated with the logo when it comes to decision making. So if there is a fake can of coke in the supermarket that looks exaactly the same then i will buy it because i think it is coke and all i associate with it. So protecting your logo or making it unique is a major point of every branding campaign because when it comes to decsion making people need visual help! And if- as already mentioned- somebody puts the coke logo on a product i will believe it is coke quality and only afterwards realize it maybe was not. off topic: i love your blog! fabs |
Administrator
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I think the point I was trying to make is that on the web, the rules might be different I think. Your brand is the sum total experince of your web site. The implications of protecting your logo are different to a product, because its virtually impossible to duplicate that entire website experince. I think that decisions are made on the web based on that sum experience, not what logo is in the top left corner. I would be very interested in how your thesis examines the impact of the web on developing a brand. Maybe a guest post  |
Andrew Perry
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I agree that how you represent your logo on your website is only a small part of establishing your online brand. But like a website, a logo is part of a broad branding strategy. You can't put a picture of your website on a billboard on the side of the road and expect it to generate a response in people that will get them to log on and buy goods or services from the site. That is what a logo is for. A logo is a way of capturing the essence of your entire brand in a way that will hopefully evoke a response from people when they see it. Often, the thoughts and feelings people have when they see your logo will be based on your broader marketing (including your website) and therefore your brand is something bigger than your logo - your logo is just like a "bookmark" in peoples' minds that reminds them about the broader brand. Because you often have to spend a lot of marketing time and dollars to build up a reputation in a logo, we always encourage clients to register their logo as a trade mark and to do searches to check whether someone is already using a similar logo for similar goods or services, or has already registered it as a trade mark. This prevents you spending all that effort connecting your brand with that logo, only to find out that people are mistakenly thinking you are someone else. If the other organisation has a bad reputation then people seeing your logo will automatically be turned off your products and services, while if they have a good reputation they may take legal action against you for trying to take advantage of that by using the same or similar logo. Neither of these are good situations to find yourself in. On the issue of your website being (or forming part of) your brand, the layout of your website can be protected by layout copyright, depending on your jurisdiction, so the law does recognise that the way things are laid out on a page (or webpage) requires some thought and can be valuable. Andrew www.legalconsult.com.au |
Andrew Perry
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| I should add that if you check out our website (www.legalconsult.com.au), we do not have a graphic as our logo but we use our name in the bauhaus font. That is because we agree that a graphic is not always necessary to encapsulate your brand - your distinctive name can do that. It really depends on what "market" you are in. |
Christopher Richards
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Logos are the modern equivalent of the coat-of-arms. An aristocratic family defined itself through heraldic symbols which had meaning tied to deeds done and favors granted royalty. With a small aristocratic elite everyone knew what those symbols meant.. Are you still with me? Good, keep reading. You can easily make a relationship between a corporate hierarchy and the feudal system. The CEO is the King, upper management are the knights etc. One could argue that the corporation needs a logo, but a small business doesn’t. If you are in the business of designing logos, then I can see how you would object. For a logo to mean anything, it needs a lot of marketing muscle to make an impression. Twelve years ago I worked for a company that spent over $1M on their logo. I’m convinced that spending much time creating a logo makes no sense for a small company. Yet, people do get worked up about it. You can think of a brand as that thing cowboys heat up and put on cattle. It’s like ownership. However, for a small company, I like to think of the brand as being the experience and benefit of doing business. For small business, the narrower the focus and more targeted that business is with respect to its clients the better. The brand is the personality of the company, its voice, its manners, its ability; and for the client it is the expectation. www.ChristopherRichards.com |
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