Brandopoly Blog
Brandopoly news, tips & tricks, and stories from our customers.
What Makes a Logo Work
Logos are often confused with positioning statements. A logo is not meant to describe a business, it’s simply meant to identify a business. Meaning is created by what it symbolizes, not the other way around. Ultimately what it means is more important than what it looks like. Your logo represents your brand and becomes a symbol—a symbol that’s faster to recognize than words, more memorable than words, and works in any language.
Here are some basic guidelines and questions that you can use to help guide your logo design process.
3 Logo Questions
- What does the competition look like? Do some research, look at what your competitors are doing and think about how you can stand out from the crowd while at the same time look like you belong in that market.
- Is the mark relevant? A logo may not need to describe your business, but it does represent it. Tone, style, imagery should all make sense and work to support what your company does.
- Will it work with our future needs? You may be a small business now, but once you make it to the Fortune 500 Club, will your logo still work?
4 Key Logo Ingredients
- Attractive—no one likes ugly logos.
- Reproducible in both black and white, and color—think of everything from a black and white fax sheet to an online directory ad to the side of a truck—your logo needs to work for you everywhere
- Reproducible at any size—your logo needs to be easy to read both small and large—on a business card or 48 foot wide outdoor billboard, and everything in between
- Memorable—that’s the bottom line after all, make sure your logo leaves your audience with one thing to remember, that’s all you need.
7 Logo Benchmarks
Once you’ve designed your logo make sure it passes these benchmarks:
- It has a strong, balanced image with no little extras that clutter its look
- It’s distinctive and bold in design, making it easy to see at a glance
- It has graphic imagery that looks appropriate for your business
- It works well with your company name
- The type is handled with an easy-to-read font
- It communicates your business clearly
- It looks good in black and white, as well as in color
Logos work when they reduce complex ideas—you, your company, your market, and your mission statement— to a symbol, conveying the essence of your company directly, simply, and effectively.
Building Brand Equity
In today’s globally connected marketplace, brands represent the intangible aspects of a company. Your brand confirms your credibility, connects emotionally with your target audience, motivates them to buy, and creates customer loyalty.
A company’s marketing materials are the imaging of its brand and essentially the point of entry to its brand. Image and perception drive value. Without an image to represent you, there is no perception.
Ultimately, your brand is your reputation. It’s about making a promise to your customer—being consistent and predictable—building relationships and promising long-term value. Your brand is the foundation of your marketing program; you don’t want to be without a strong one.
Benefits of a Strong Brand
- Delivers your message clearly
- Confirms your credibility
- Connects with your target prospects emotionally
- Motivates the buyer
- Fosters customer loyalty
Five Steps to Building Your Brand:
- Articulate your brand identity clearly; set expectations across your organization for your products and services.
- Establish a customer value proposition. Each department in your company needs to understand what that proposition is and the key role they play in delivering it.
- Define the optimal customer experience. Create a consistent and compelling experience at each of the touch points where your customer interacts with your company. Try to look at it from the customer’s perspective rather than your internal view.
- Cultivate relationships with customers. Listen attentively to what they are telling you, learn from it, and respond.
- Strengthen your brand over time. Always be on the lookout for ways that you can enhance your brand-customer relationship.
Ultimately, the power of a brand lies in minds of customers—in what they have experienced and learned about the brand over time. Consumer knowledge is at the heart of your company’s brand equity.
What's in a Name?
The Brandopoly Story is an ongoing series on the history of Brandopoly: its beginnings, growth, and reinvention as told by CEO and founder Tom Trapp. The first installment is on the origin of the Brandopoly name:
It’s interesting to hear what people do in their spare time. A friend of mine, Harold takes boulders and scrap wood and fashions them into some of the most amazing sculpture pieces you’ve ever seen. Another friend, Russ, visits Civil War battlefields and can explain with the excitement of an eyewitness the intricacies of many major and minor battles. As for myself, I play a game where I try thinking of ideas for companies. Not companies that I would necessarily want to run, but companies I think would be fun to create.
The process usually starts with a url and then I fill in the details later. It’s always seemed like a safe place to start because without the web address, I felt it wasn’t viable. In the late 90’s and for a few years after that, I used to sit around late at night plugging words into Netsol to see what was available. I was consistently amazed by what words were still available that far into the dotcom boom. On one such night, July 1, 2002, the word brand was on my mind and after hitting a few dead ends, Brandopoly popped into my head. It was available and so I registered it.
The question I asked myself was what is it? A check in the dictionary told me “opoly” meant control. All these years of playing Monopoly and I had no idea it meant one entity in control. So Brandopoly simply meant brand control. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but the answer was only a few weeks away.
The New Brandopoly
We at Brandopoly are hard at work at creating the next generation of marketing tools for businesses. Currently, we're in private beta, but in the coming weeks we'll talk more about what Brandopoly is, how it can help you, and how you can try it out for yourself. For now, check out a special sneak-peak at the new Brandopoly:
What is Brandopoly?
Brandopoly is both a powerful marketing system and an easy-to-use page layout tool. It allows you to quickly create custom marketing materials for either a single product or a global enterprise in minutes.
With virtually no learning curve, Brandopoly lets you create, customize, and brand everything you need to market your organization: stationery, web banners, advertising, presentations, and more.
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New Blog Post: What Makes a Logo Work http://bit.ly/Iienf1 year 8 weeks ago
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New Blog Post: Building Brand Equity http://brandopoly.com/about/blog/2009/6/17/building-brand-equity1 year 10 weeks ago
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New Blog Post: What's in a Name? http://bit.ly/DHnxE1 year 12 weeks ago
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New Blog Post: The New Brandopoly http://bit.ly/1aPAkJ1 year 12 weeks ago
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Check out the new Brandopoly website: http://brandopoly.com1 year 14 weeks ago