What's in a Brand?

• What's in your Brand?
• What can customers expect from your brand?
• Why should consumers choose your brand over that of your competitor?
• Is it important to have a logo as part of your brand?
• Does your logo contribute value to your brand identity?
• Should I even have a logo?

These are interesting and important questions and there have been volumes written on each of the points above.

I am prompted to write this after reflecting on the changes we made as part of our recent Web-site redesign project with partner Kuno Creative and after reading this blog article, Brand Logos: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from Rachel Sprung of HubSpot last week. 

Designing Brand Identity

In her book Designing Brand Identity, Alina Wheeler has helped thousands of companies improve their image and sharpen their brand value proposition. The following excerpts from her book are relevant to our conversation and are worthy reminders of important brand basics.

• The best Brands marry intelligence and insight with imagination and craft. (Connie Birdsall, Creative Director, Lippincott.)
• Brand Identity fuels recognition, amplifies differentiation, and makes big ideas meaningful and accessible.
• A Big Idea functions as an organizational totem pole around which strategy, behavior, actions and communications are aligned. These simply worded statements are used internally as a beacon of a distinctive culture and externally as a competitive advantage that helps consumers make choices.
• The right Name is timeless, tireless, easy to say and remember; it stands for something and facilitates brand extensions.
• Creating Value is the indisputable goal of most organizations. A brand is an intangible asset -brand identity, which includes all tangible expression from packaging to websites, upholds that value.
• A Wordmark is a freestanding word or words. It may be a company name or acronym. The best brandmarks imbue a legible word(s) with distinctive font characteristics, and may integrate abstract or pictorial elements

Admarco Branding Redesign Case Study.

Original Design

 2004 when we conceived this logo seems like such a long time ago and our first logo was very crude by  today's standards. Our original logo concept  incorporated ideas from our sales and marketing  methodology, our website color scheme and a 3 letter acronym that made it easier to communicate our name in print.

 

 

 

 

First Revision

The first revision corrected the error of the rotated image and skewed text in the first place which added no meaning, although it looked cleaner.

Second revision

Our second redesign effort stuck with elements of the original concept, but simplified the look and feel and reduced the footprint as it was hogging space on our home page. I was perfectly happy with this logo on our new Website until we had a comment suggesting that the new Website design was let down by the old fashioned logo.

 

New Wordmark 

 Following the web-site redesign, we engaged Kuno  Creative to come up with a new logo and they  submitted some interesting designs.  It dawned on  us during this project that it was more important to associate our company name Admarco LLC and url, Admarco.net with our d/b/a name Advanced Marketing Concepts, than it was a logo. This is the design we chose from the wordmarks they created. I like the up-arrow on the "d" as it associates upward momentum with our name...it also serves as a distinctive favicon.

Conclusions

1. For most B2B technology companies, nobody cares about your logo but you and your marketing team.
2. 64 of the 2011 Fortune 100 companies logos are Wordmarks
3. Maybe if you are a household name and loved by millions of consumers changing brand mark or logo does make a difference....ask GAP about their recent rebrand.
4. For emerging B2B technology companies, a wordmark is a more effective branding device than a logo.