The Million Dollar Logo
July 22, 2005
Occasionally the business press will run a story about K-Mart or Xerox paying millions of dollars to redesign their logo. Most people find these examples absurd and echo the familiar retort about abstract art: “My child could doodle the equivalent in a matter of minutes.”
Red-blooded graphic designers will jump into the fray, passionately explaining the immense skill and effort needed to “explore” thousands of possible “identity solutions” that can be embraced by the existing corporate culture.
And while they have a point, a million dollars plus for a giant red “X” or a giant “K” is still pretty steep. Personally, I think that desperate corporations like Xerox and K-Mart were willing to try anything to reinvent themselves, and a million dollar logo was akin to therapy. It had little actual marketing impact, but it made management feel like they were doing something as their corporate fortunes dwindled.
At the other end of the scale, people have been conditioned by the business press to believe that having a logo is absolutely essential. I once was meeting with a small town businessman whose company had a crude, amateurishly drawn logo. When I suggested that I could “update and refine it” he looked at me aghast and launched into a justification of consistency and brand equity that would have made any marketing MBA proud.
I think the power of corporate logos are vastly overrated. The Nike swoosh is considered successful because it is instantly identifiable worldwide. But you need to remember that Nike has spent billions and billions of dollars on marketing. It has gotten far more exposure than any other logo, partly because it receives trillions of exposures by being placed on every item of sportswear that Nike (and its imitators) produce. Can you honestly say that your company is anywhere near the situation Nike is in?
The simple fact of the matter is, that even if you were to promote your logo at every opportunity, there is little chance it will ever become as ubiquitous as Nike’s (and remember that it took almost twenty years before Nike had the guts to run an ad with no copy, only a shoe and a swoosh).
Your identity — logo, naming, and tagline — doesn’t need to be fancy or high-tech. A spinning, graduated orb isn’t going sell more products. Half the logos I see turn to mush once they’ve gone through a cycle on the fax machine or been shrunk to fit onto a website banner. I think companies would be far better off if they used simpler, more legible logos that clearly stated their business purpose. A descriptive tagline in a nicely set typeface is far more helpful to your customers than any swirling swoosh.