One back to pat.
A blog about the relationship between your information technology and your brand, from corporate strategy all the way through to customer service.
Archive for April, 2010
Remaking your brand: don’t start with your logo, end with it.
Thursday, April 8th, 2010Like a network, like human resources, like any other function within a successful business, marketing needs continuous improvement. When I was in advertising and integrated marketing, one of the most common questions when starting a new relationship with a client was: should we change the logo?
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.
Autotask and VARStreet: What does the acquisition mean and how does it change the market?
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010For IT managed service providers, the acquisition is an interesting one. FAR uses Autotask today for professional services management. As a boutique MSP, we typically provide a wide range of products (hardware and software) and services to our clients to me very specific needs. This can make procurement a bit of a challenge. The acquisition will allow us to use Autotask to track and streamline our hardware and software sales processes as well, and that’s a powerful opportunity. There are a lot of potential benefits to the deal for both FAR and our customers.
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.