Nobody Cares About Your New Logo

I was asked recently “what are characteristics of good logo?”.

“The things that you think matter typically do not” is the answer. So, if you or if I personally think it looks good, that’s probably just personal taste.

What really matters is the abundance of the logo. Big time. Nothing else comes close to the importance of this.

So, your logo is fine… So is the colour scheme. And the placement of that little graphic you spent 13 hours designing. And the fact that it's all in lower case...

…….right now, your real problem is nobody knows about it.

"right now, your real problem is nobody knows about it"

To prove my point, actually look for a moment at the logos for some billion dollar businesses like SAP, Starbucks, Snapchat and Facebook (I don’t know why I’ve picked ones that mostly start with an S!). There’s nothing spectacular about them at all. In fact, if you came to me with a new logo for a business and it was the Snapchat ghost, I or anyone else would probably say “what is that thing supposed to be?!”

But it doesn’t matter. Because nobody really cares. Or more specifically, the audience (those actually buying the product) don't care. Why? They're too busy buying the outcome of owning the product: saving time, looking good in front of their peers, making more money. Stuff that matters to consumers.

Facebook's logo: a lower case, white 'f'. Yet it's instantly recognisable. That's because of its "distribution", not the ability of the design work to evoke an emotion. That doesn't happen without familiarity.

The thing is that with time and enough exposure, people get used to some pretty weird things. Another example is the names of companies: “Google”, “Snapchat”, “Twitter” all feel like regular names now, don't they? But imagine hearing them for the first time. If they were completely new they’d raise a lot of eyebrows. People would say “what the hell does that even mean?”.

But again, it doesn’t matter — because hundreds of millions, if not billions, make use of them. Clearly, having a made-up word for your company name doesn't impede your ability to grow.

So what’s the lesson here? It's a simple one: focus on creating abundance. A target demographic's familiarity with your logo or name is what matters. That’s light years more important than how it looks, with almost zero exceptions. So the saying goes in marketing: "10 percent content and 90 percent distribution".

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Richard Moore is the Founder of the Basics of Sales course. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram.