In my entire marketing career (at fair part of which was spent in agency life), I’ve really only pushed to change a corporate logo once.  There are a lot of good reasons not to change your logo (I’ll be talking about some of them in this article). But if a company really wants to change its logo, this article provides some tips.

First, why shouldn’t you change your logo?

The number one reason not to change your logo is that it typically represents the most sizable monetary investment in your brand.  If you have 2 to 200 collateral sheets, case studies, PowerPoint presentations, Web sites, tradeshow booth graphics with your logo on it, changing your logo means changing all of those things and the associated costs.

More important, your business has invested what it has to date in making that logo successful in the marketplace.  That doesn’t mean you should never rebrand; it just means that you should only consider changing the logo as a broader part of a rebranding project.

What’s the difference between changing the logo and rebranding?

The logo is the shorthand for your brand in the marketplace.  Nike, for example, shorthands a lot of things with its swoosh logo: a company that’s focused on making premium athletic shoes for a variety of demographics that promote an active, can-do lifestyle, as well as a strong and responsive customer service organization.  That’s a lot for just a swoosh!

Customer service is actually a remarkably important part of a company’s brand. Unfortunately for both customers and marketers, it is often one of the most neglected parts of a corporate brand.  This is changing rapidly in large part due to social media. The Internet is perhaps the world’s largest and best organized soap box for anyone with a complaint.

All that talk lately on the Internet about brand reputation management.  Brand reputation management is primarily about addressing customer service success or failure.   I’ll be returning to this in a future blog. In short, however, the logo just represents and is the most visible part of your brand; you brand is much deeper.

When should a company change its brand?

If your brand changes, then that’s a good time to consider whether or not to change your logo.  For example, if you add a new service line, if you diversify your product portfolio, if you change (or want to change) your customer base by going up market or down market, you might want to engage in some rebranding, in which case, you might want to consider retooling your logo.

A company that goes up market from small to mid-market customers, that goes from one product or service line to five, etc., should probably consider a rebranding exercise. Or, startups that just invested a small amount in the logo until they could figure out their brand should reconsider once there’s financial opportunity to rebrand.

In short, the decision to change your logo should come at the end of a fair amount of soul searching, market research and other operational decisions.  It should be the last step toward reimagining your brand, and only if it’s really critical, not the first.

But Design Company X says I should change my logo!

Logos do eventually get stale. Many of them are not well-designed.  Those that are well-designed may not be reflective of the brand. (I’ll be discussing good logo design in a future blog). And naturally, businesses change.  In short, even if you have a strong brand and a reasonable logo, it’s certainly possible that your corporate logo should change.

Most of all, a new logo should never be a new coat of paint on a house that’s falling down.  If your brand is strong, no matter how deliriously ugly your logo is, your logo is doing just fine.  Just look at IBM, a very plain, very uninteresting logo but one of the strongest brands in business.  Nike’s trademark swoosh is even less interesting, less designed in some respects.  Apple’s old logo (the multi-colored version) was dreadful.  But it’s the brand that makes the logo, not the other way around.

But as the logo goes, so does everything else. When it comes to changing the logo, most design companies see a key opportunity to redesign everything else.  If that’s what’s right for your business, go for it.  But if a design agency pushes hard to change a logo that works for a brand that works, don’t fix what’s not broken.  But sometimes, your logo really is broken and in my next blog, I’ll be talking about how to fix it.

First, it simplifies.  Procurement today is often a time-consuming process for IT shops depending on the distributors and vendors with whom they work.  Procurement is also often a business process that is fairly separate from business development deployment, technical support, and customer service (as well as billing, performance management, among other capabilities) — all of which Autotask provides support for today.  The acquisition opens the door to the prospect that FAR will be able to make even greater use of Autotask to keep what’s happening in our business in one location.

Second, it streamlines.  The power to find pricing and other information quickly and at our finger tips is pretty cool, and it will help save us time during procurement. Time is always money for IT Managed Service providers like FAR.   It will help make procurement simpler and more straightforward than it is today. It will also help FAR to save time when we respond to our customers.  No one likes to wait long to find out what something is going to cost them.

Third, it helps us to help our customers  If FAR wanted to, we could open up an ecommerce portal to our customers to help them streamline their buying processes.  Helping to save our customers time and helping them to make stronger purchase decisions more efficiently is never a bad thing. Imagine being able to pop onto FAR’s Web site and then buying a new laptop or order a new IP phone! As a company that focuses on excellence in customer service, we’re very excited about this prospect.

The functionality is very promising, both for FAR and for our customers. But the acquisition also fundamentally alters the PSA landscape.  This is a game changer for Autotask. It further differentiates the company as one that’s seriously focused on doing what it can to serve Managed Services providers do better business. In short, we’re very excited about the acquisition and we’re looking forward to how it shapes up.  You can learn more about it from Autotask’s Web site.

The purchase represents a number of things:  further consolidation in the VoIP and unified communications markets; a strong marriage between a hardware and software vendor; and an adaptation of the market that I was talking about in 2007 when everyone was roundly declaring that the PBX was dead.  Yeah, not really.

Look out, Cisco and Avaya

Objectworld’s UC Server (now ADTRAN’s NetVanta Unified Communications) was and remains an excellent offering. You have to see it to believe it. In 2005 when I joined Objectworld, the product was disruptive and visionary in the way that the iPhone has been disruptive and visionary.  It put a lot of what’s cool, useful and interesting put into a single, simplifying package in a telecommunications industry that was largely stagnant, bloated (even the challengers) and reliant on its installed base to slouch toward profits.

Obviously, the deal represents a further drawing up of a highly complicated market.  It’s only natural to see some consolidation during an economic downturn.  Even still, VoIP and UC have done remarkably well in 2008 and 2009. This particular deal (and similar M&A activity) ensures that customers will continue to benefit.  Prices are likely to continue to decrease, while the overall value of offerings will continue to increase. Adtran’s purchase of Objectworld is just an excellent example of this trend. No surprises there.

What sets the deal between Adtran and Objectworld particularly apart from other M&A activities over the last couple of years is the uniqueness of the fit.  Objectworld’s and now ADTRAN’s offerings include the PBX, individual productivity through its desktop client and organizational/operation productivity through its service creation environment.  It takes about 15 minutes/user to setup (shocking in an industry where 2-4 hours/user is the norm).

It’s difficult to think of another product on the market that was as feature-rich in key ways that seriously drive business productivity.  Even with all the VoIP and UC activity over the last five years, the offering is still unrivalled in the space and its value still remains largely untapped.  ADTRAN’s strong brand, installed base and rich, well-rounded product portfolio add a lot of value for customers.

Just as important—I called it!  The PBX is not dead.
Getting back to me, years back when people started talking about the death of the PBX and how it would vanish eventually, I was one of the voices of reason saying it wouldn’t happen (who wasn’t also working for a traditional telco vendor). I was right. It’s not because I’m a visionary; it’s because I was keeping my eye on the prize of what my customers valued and articulating clearly and honestly to them what I had to offer, not on hype.  Every good marketer should.

The PBX will be similar to modems and calculators. It’s unlikely to disappear entirely any time soon.  Instead, the hardware required will be increasingly commoditized. That doesn’t mean that hardware will go away entirely, any more than other useful specialized hardware peripherals have, even though they have software equivalents (e.g., firewalls and routers).

Instead, UC is best delivered by a combination of highly specialized hardware, general purpose hardware and software, some software focused on user productivity, some software focused on organizational productivity.  It will be organized within the data-center model (that is, OAM&Ped by IT teams around business requirements and software capabilities rather than around hardware limitations the way the old telecommunications model was).  And unlike the PBX, which was a necessary expense that sat in the closet, unified communications solutions can be a key source of revenue and productivity that sits on the desktop, in the server room, and reaches outside of the business to empower customers to do their own phone-based self-service and a great deal more.

The right unified communications solution will change business communications in the way that the Web 2.0 has changed the Internet.
Unified communications is set to reshape how we communicate.  Everyone in the industry knows this.  The question is: how long is going to take us to get UC and what will the right UC solution look like?

It’s 2010. The market is warming back up.  Businesses need to reduce costs and help their employees respond more quickly, more intelligently and more professionally to customers than ever before.  Is there a product on the market that includes VoIP managed with Active Directory, unified messaging, unified communication, and service creation (for all those phone-based apps), that works with Polycom, with snom, with GrandStream and a wealth of other third-party products and services other than Adtran’s Netvanta?  Not really.  Nor is there likely to be one any time soon.

It’s just not in the DNA (to use the phrase of one of my colleagues) of most hardware companies to embrace and successfully commercialize software.  There’s a huge difference between understanding how to engineer a brilliant and elegant hardware device and how to create a usable software product that drives productivity.  What customers need from a unified communications solution is a little bit of both.  Adtran seems to be one of the only hardware companies in the field today smart enough to figure that out.  If you’re looking for unified communications and VoIP, be sure to check out their offerings (and then phone FAR).

1. Measure twice, invest once.
It’s the reinvention of an old adage, but it’s still true for businesses today. A year ago, businesses could take a few messages out to the public and see what stuck. Today, we have to focus on narrowing the message even more than we normally would. That puts the emphasis on solid research to understand the buyer, but it also puts the focus on low-cost tools that can help us conduct that research (e.g., using Google adwords and other paid search to understand what key words and messages have the greatest resonance with our audiences). It’s important to find the best message you can, since the budget to get that message out is probably going to shrink and you’re going to be increasingly reliant on viral marketing.

2. If it ain’t broke, be careful how you fix it.
Like a network, marketing requires continuous improvement, but once you have a good message, stick with it. With the downturn in the economy, one of the first suggestions that everyone making business decisions will hear from everyone else is: “maybe we need to change the message!” If your message has always focused on a solid value proposition that resonates with your buyer, there’s no reason to change your message at all. In fact, changing your message involves a lot of difficult to calculate costs in terms of your time, re-educating your buyers about what’s important about your offerings, and so on. If there’s no evidence that your message is the problem, don’t change it.

3. Focus on closing sales.
Your sales pipeline may stay constant or it may even increase depending on the kind of product or service you’re selling, but more than ever, closing the deal should be your mantra. Sales are what count in a recession (and even when it’s not a recession). Of course, leads are important, but every sales you close creates revenue that you can use to turn into generate new leads. Moreover, the cost to generate 100 leads may be much smaller than the cost to turn one of those leads into a sale — depending on your sales cycle.  Everyone in the organization should be looking for ways to help the sales team close deals. Role up your sleeves and get out there. Get involved in account plans if you company works through channel sales so that you can help your partners market themselves. If you’re company is more of a direct play, work with your organizational teams to identify, qualify and close key opportunities. Don’t take no for an answer!

4. Follow the buyer.
This is good advice even when it’s not a recession. Invest some time and research into learning more about how your buyers makes purchasing decisions, what sources of information they consider to be important, and which they take to be most credible. Most buyers, for example, don’t make major purchasing decisions about software by going at a tradeshow, and yet, many marketing professionals spend a great deal of time and capital investing in shows to drive awareness with the buyer. There’s nothing wrong with attending a tradeshow if you can afford it, but you should invest the most amount of capital you can reaching your buyer directly through media and venues they trust. Maybe that’s a tradeshow, but more likely, that’s a Wikipedia article, a YouTube video, a how-to blog article, and other Web 2.0 media.

5. Don’t just imitate.
Many senior marketing pros repeat what they learned while they were coming up through the ranks. There’s something to be said for the wisdom of experience and all that, but your tactics should be guided by what’s happening on the ground. The economy in North America has been largely on the rise for the last two decades, and that has meant more liberal spending. Buyers have been looking more at maximal value rather than optimal value. Relationships and convenience have been more meaningful buying criteria, but buying formulas are changing. The question is: how? If you’re not sure, work with your sales team to get out into the field as much as you can and get some empirical data.

6. Learn and adapt.
As a corollary to 5, put a renewed emphasis on your willingness to adapt. The recession will naturally affect everyone’s buying cycle as well as their criteria. If you don’t have a lot of experience with the micro- and macroeconomics of recession and how that affects buying, you can help yourself and your company with a little research. The importance of perceived value tends to go up in the minds of purchasers as the economy goes down, but it’s difficult to predict and depends on what you’re selling. You can also help yourself and your company by understanding what new objections there are to purchase decisions among your customers and thinking of new and creative ways to counter them.

7. Understand your brand.
This was a truism even before the recession, but every buyer knows that marketing is marketing and most buyers tend to treat marketing as white noise. In terms of branding, that has meant a turn toward minimalism (all those Nike ads without much Nike branding in them are a good example). To make use of a Zen koan, the focus has turned from the designing of the bowl itself, to understanding, designing and, indeed, inventing the space that the bowl creates and how that space is meaningful and useful to your customers. Today, your brand should much less reflect who you are, much more reflect who your customer wants to be because your business should be a happy marriage of the relationship between you and your customers.

8. Solve the right problem.
Once your house is in order, start looking at the rest of the pre-sales cycle. If sales are flagging, nine times out of ten, the problem’s not with the message; it’s with the delivery. A successful pre-sales cycle that takes the customer from cold lead to closed deal is a matter of making sure things fall into place as they should when they should. You can’t solve an awareness problem with better messaging. You can’t solve an interest problem just by throwing more money into promotion. You can’t solve a channel relationship problem with more creative and compelling advertising. You can’t solve product problems with a blog. Understand the company’s pre-sales (and if you can, its post-sales) proceses inside and out, figure out which problems are a real impediment to sales, and press as much as you can to address these problems with the right solutions.

9. Remember, you’re also always branding, marketing and selling yourself.
If one thing is true about being being in business, whether you’re an entrepreneur, in sales or marketing, or a little of all three, it’s that you’re always having to prove yourself. Sales proves itself with closed deals. Development proves itself with a working product. Operations proves itself with working processes and supply chain. Customer service proves itself with happy customers and closed cases. How are you proving your worth to your customers? Web traffic, leads and other traditional marketing KPIs may not be enough anymore. Look to the successes in other organizations and build a clear, compelling story about how your leadership was necessary to make every other organization in the company successful. Closed deals indicate a strong, easily understood value proposition, articulated in ways customers understand and value. A good, working product that customers value indicates a proper understanding of and response to customer needs. Happy customers mean correctly set expectations, and so on.

10. Focus on the three Rs: reputation, repetition and refinement.
Once you have a formula that’s getting you traction, don’t be content to rest on your laurels. Continue to focus on building your reputation with potential buyers, continue to repeat everything that’s working for you, but also discard what’s not working. It’s true that the problem with marketing is that you can’t always know what will work, but you can always know what’s not working. Build a reputation for yourself as someone who makes highly creative, intuitive decisions, but also as someone who relies on the measurable numbers and strong analytical skills to contextualize the numbers in order to inform those decisions. If something’s not working, dump it and move on.