Ok, I’m opinionated, I admit it, but I wonder if I’ll be vindicated here and I’ll explain more…
You see ages ago my other half used to work for a huge multinational catering company. The company used to spend untold amounts of money changing its logo every year. Clearly some overpaid, narcissist (wait for it there’s more) “full of their own importance” marketing director thought it was a capital idea and would improve the image of the company. As you can imagine, the cost must have been staggering and for the day to day managers (of which there were thousands) it was an annual nuisance and joke, ensuring the right letter heads, menu cards and a whole plethora of other things needed to be discarded and replaced.
Later in our business life, when establishing an agency (back in 1999), the concept for the first company logo was drawn up by an artist my hubby knew and from there, fine tuned working with a designer he’d known for many years and we kept that logo for 14 years.
Our view is that, the logo should never change – evolve a little perhaps, but never change and I think that view is shared by many big companies – think McDonalds Golden Arches or Ford, Google, NBC, Micosoft and Lego – I could go on. Change, evolve, improve, slip back, whatever the company does, generally the logo stays as is.
It (the logo that is) should be the fine distillation of the company’s very essence, represented in one small image and I repeat, it should never change.
Nor saying that, should it cost a king’s ransom. Whilst I have a great admiration of Lord (Seb) Coe, the lambasting he received after paying some £400,000 for the 2012 Olympic logo was well deserved I think. Utter madness is an understatement in most sane peoples minds and I’m sure designers across the UK were exclaiming “my God, we would have done that for £25k or less!
The point is that a logo is a symbol, a reminder of your brand and of who you are. Nike for another example I read, spent $250 for the Nike “tick” or whatever it is, but isn’t that the point? Whatever it’s supposed to be, we all recognise the Nike logo.
If only people would spend as much time and money on their planning , mission statement and strategy as they did the logo, they would do better I’m sure.
