David Ogilvy famously once said “Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys.” For those of you who don’t know, Ogilvy is known somewhat as the “Father of Advertising” a wizard when it came to understanding the dynamics of using emotion to create brand loyalty. He understood the truth that customers will judge a business or products in just a few seconds based on visual appeal alone and that good branding gives businesses credibility—and that’s priceless.
No more is this true than when it comes to small businesses who need to create and build brand loyalty. Ironically its often the small business with its limited resources that sees using professional design services for their logo and building their brand as too expensive and often try to cut corners and save costs in this area. This often means the responsibility of their brand often falls to someone within their organization who is not qualified to do a proper job. Usually it’s someone like a marketing assistant who knows a little Photoshop and InDesign. Or even worse, a company will trust their brand creation with outsourcing online to India where cheap labour churns out cookie cutter logos at ridiculously low prices. Sadly the result is rarely good. Here are some of the reasons why its critical to invest wisely in creating a brand;
Longevity: To develop an authentic logo that is relevant and has longevity a fairly in depth process of research and strategy takes place. Even before we hit the creative drawing board to create the “big” ideas we are collecting data to correctly position our clients business or product correctly in the marketplace. This research phase takes much more into account than just a competitive analysis. When clients don’t undergo this process their logo and brand quickly becomes outdated and irrelevant because more often than not it has been created on zero to none strategy and based purely on subjective reasoning. A complete overhaul is often necessary which can be very costly if this brand has been rolled out over multiple channels. When professional designers with experience handle your brand creation you can expect this logo mark to last you well into the lifetime of your business or product and be able to handle growth and the development of sub brands well into the future. So if you expect outsourcing your logo to India is going to save you a few dollars now, just think at what you will need to spend in the future to overhaul an outdated irrelevant brand. Not to mention the damage to your brand recognition and credibility.
Flexibility: When a logo and brand is created by a professional how this logo will be transferrable across multiple marketing channels is always a primary consideration. It’s no use to have a great looking logo in full colour but when its transferred to mono for advertising or reversed out it also needs to be recognizable and memorable. Same goes with scale-ability, how will your logo look on a business card as opposed to being blown up to be viewed on the side of your transport trucks or school buses? How flexible is your brand when facing the changes in technology? How does it stand up in the digital platform? A professional agency knows how to create this flexibility to see your brand flourishing across all marketing mediums.
Credibility: This is perhaps the biggest danger in not investing in professional design services, losing credibility. There is nothing more damaging to your reputation than having poorly designed branding. You only have one chance to make a first impression, no matter how fantastic your business or product, a badly designed brand means customers wont take a second look. However it is you first touch base with a potential customer be it a business card, website, brochure or E Blast make sure you get it right the first time.
Credibility and brand loyalty comes from having your brand authentically reflect your business or products positioning statement, and doing so in a consistent way, across every piece of marketing material in circulation. Don’t trust this essential building block of your business’ success on your brother’s, sister’s cousin who knows their way around Photoshop, or a faceless churn and burn logo factory in India!