Like 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.