EFFECTIVE LOGOS, PART 1

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Nike swoosh. The Double Arches. BMW’s propeller. At there best, logos are stop signs, allowing your clients to find your product among the throngs and your prospects to distinguish your brand from others on a visceral level. At their worst, logos can be…well, like London 2012 Olympic symbol: jarring, difficult to understand and irrelevant to the message.

Effective logos have several characteristics in common. Part 1 focuses on the conceptual principles of logo design. Part 2 will focus on the technical guidelines for logo design.

Part 1: CONCEPTUAL PRINCIPLES
Effective guidelines share three important traits: they are memorable, distinct and representative.

MEMORABLE
How many times have you gone to the store, only to realize you don’t remembered the brand your spouse or parent always buys? You search the shelves until finally—there it is: the one with the yellow circle, or blue ribbon, or big white letters. A memorable logo allows your clients to pick you out from a field of competitors, even when they can’t quite recall your name or the name of your product.

One example of a memorable logo is the New York classic rebus (a representation of words in the form of pictures or symbols). This logo is recognized, remembered and replicated worldwide. After seeing it only once, most viewers could not only recall its elements, they could probably reproduce it blindfolded.

Nike was so sure that their logo was memorable, they ran a series of commercials that never mentioned the company’s name. The parting shot was simply the world-famous “swoosh”. The commercials worked because Nike had made its swoosh symbol so memorable and so recognized that the viewer, upon seeing the logo, automatically supplied the company’s name. Requiring the consumer to recall the name of the company in response to the picture actually made the commercials more powerful, because it required interaction and discovery. However, the strategy only worked because the majority of Nike’s audience remembered the name of the company when they saw the swoosh.


DISTINCT
If you’ve ever traveled to a country that used a different alphabet, you probably had the experience of finding (often with relief) American soft drinks. And although you couldn’t read the writing, you knew whether it was a Coke or a Pepsi you were about to imbibe. Red with white ribbon? Coca-cola. Blue with a tri-colored sphere? Pepsi. The logos are so distinctive you don’t need to understand—or even see—the writing on the can. It wasn’t always that way, though. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1960’s that Pepsi changed its logo from red script to the block letters that distinguished it from Coke. Pepsi evolved its logo to be distinctive, and loyal consumers were able to find their beverage much more easily.

REPRESENTATIVE
As with every marketing effort, your logo should reinforce your brand in the mind of the customer. For instance, The bottled-water producer Dasani has built its brand around clear, refreshing water. Their well-chosen logo has clean, blue, fluid graphics. The design reinforces the image of the product it is promoting and communicates an expectation to a thirsty consumer: buy our water, and experience clear, pure refreshment.

NBC’s recognizable peacock quietly reminds us of its long history in the television industry (it was originally introduced in 1956 with NBC groundbreaking movement into color broadcasting), but it stays representative with its allusion to the variety of programming the NBC networks offer their viewers.

Your logo must reinforce your message in the eyes of your customer. The Olympic committee, who paid $800,000 for the design, stated that the 2012 logo is a cutting-edge appeal to the young people of the world. International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge says that it "captures the essence of the London 2012 Olympic Games—namely to inspire young people around the world through sport and the Olympic values.” However, the general reaction is just the opposite. Rather than innovative, the image strikes people as 80’s retro, harkening to Miami Vice and bad perms. Compare this to Sony’s PS2 logo, which resonates with the demographic group the Olympic committee is trying to reach. This sleek logo makes the 2012 graphic look trivial and chaotic. As always, targeting your audience correctly is critical to building your logo, your brand, and your entire marketing recipe.

Sloppy communication and targeting is bad, but a logo with a double-entendre can be lethal. Logos that suffer from optical illusions can make your brand unappealing, the butt of jokes, or even offensive. For example, the logo to the left was used by a local pediatric center. While the image was intended to be an endearing picture of a parent and child, the logo was scrapped when the company discovered their visual blunder.

A powerful logo helps your prospects remember, find and differentiate you from your competitors. A poor logo can contribute to your demise, but a great logo can give you an immense advantage and contribute directly to your bottom line.

Next week, we’ll build on these general principles with tangible technical guidelines for creating your logo.