Logo vs. Branding

Clients often confuse Logo Design for Branding, not surprising though, even designers often use these terms interchangeably. Let’s discuss what branding really is, and how it relates to your business’ logo.

A Logo falls under the “umbrella” of Branding, but it is only a small part of it. It actually falls under the category of Brand Identity. Other elements of Branding are Image, Positioning, Personality, Equity, Experience, Differentiation, Communication, Gap and Extension. All these branding elements are used to define how your clients perceive your brand, and help determine a prominent position of your brand in the marketplace. Does every business need to go through establishing all these elements of branding for their business? Well, in a perfect world, the answer is yes. Practically however, as with building a business, we take one step at the time, while keeping the big picture in mind.

A great place to start is to go through all of the Elements of Branding at the initial consultation session with GLOBAL, and at least briefly define each of them. For instance a Brand Personality is important, it will affect every element of business identity such as colors or typography.

As your business grows and develops, Branding Elements will become better defined and fine-tuned, but as with a business plan, you pretty-much need to think of it staring day one.

Why Professionally Design a Logo?

According to thefreedictionary.com the logo is: “graphic representation or symbol of a company name, trademark, abbreviation, etc., often uniquely designed for ready recognition.” There are two important aspects mentioned in the definition: trademark and ready recognition. Both basically summarize the key reasons why logo is important.

Logo can be trademarked, which is important because trademark has a value and is a sellable commodity. If your products become popular and you decide to sell your business, having your logo trademarked will increase the value of your company. Coca-Cola’s logo, for example, is currently valued at $55B (designed by compan’s co-founder).

“ReadyRecognition”
The phrase summarizes the important requisites of a logo, quite many of them. In order for a logo be a “ready recognition” it has to be simple, original, visually readable, describing not only your products or services but also a character of your company. Sure you can take a stab at it yourself. Besides, some of very famous logos were developed very inexpensively. Two famous examples are Nike’s swoosh, designed for $35 by an art student who needed money for oil paint, and the Twitter logo, bought from a illustrations database website for $15, the actual artist got only $6. Today design agencies could charge as much as $5000 for a logo (we don’t charge nearly that much by the way).

Logo is an important ingredient to your success, don’t overlook it!