Should You ”Bland” Your Brand?
Everyone’s doing it.
Take a fancy, interesting, quirky logo or wordmark and strip it down to its pure Helvetica essence. (Or Gotham, or Futura, or etc.)
It’s modern! It’s hip! It loads quicker on Android phones! Our old logo is dated! We need to be relevant!
True true, but you end up looking like every. other. brand. in the category.
Just to clarify: a logo is not a ‘brand’. Or at least it’s not your BRAND: your ‘Big B’ brand is your entire reputation and the sum total of all you do — product, pricing, where you’re sold, what your CEO Tweets, is it hip on Cape Cod, do you have a store in Monaco, etc.
But a logo is a key, often essential element of your brand. It’s your “little b” brand.
Here are 3 key reasons to keep (or create) a funky logo:
It makes your brand easy to FIND — on shelf, on the highway, down the street, on someone’s feet.
It makes your brand harder to COPY. A hand-drawn logo font isn’t in the drop-down menu of Word, or on 1001freefonts.com.
And critically, it’s much, much more DEFENSIBLE intellectual property in a court of law. Which is increasingly important with the fungal spread of copycat brands on massive global marketplaces whose names may or may not start with A.
You wanna be distinctive? Have a distinctive logo. You wanna stand out? Have a stand-out logo. You wanna be relevant? Use your distinctive logo in relevant ways.
You wanna update things? Great, but do it like Dunkin' or BK or the recent Pepsi one and BUILD on your history, not destroy it.
If you really, really wanna be bland, feel free to use the imitable Bland Book at https://blandbook.com. (God bless Vikki Ross and Paul Mellor for this piece of bland genius.)
But for everyone else, stick to your funky cool logo. (And if your logo is bland, then do something about it FFS!)
(PS: if you want more bland science — I mean brand science — in your company, I'm currently booking out speaking, training & branding projects for this fall & winter.)
#brands #branding #marketing #advertising #logo #intellectualproperty