Is it time to revisit your logo?

The first thing many of us do when we decide to start a business is get a logo designed. This can be something inexpensive or can be a significant investment, but either way it’s often the first stake in the ground that makes your start-up feel “real”. After all, it’s a tangible result and you have something to put on your business cards and website. Whether you’re doing it yourself or working with a design firm, it’s a big step forward.

But it’s not a permanent step. It’s tempting to get your logo in place and put it on autopilot. You’ve checked the box and are moving on to other things. Time slips past as you focus on building and sustaining your business.

Much like you schedule time to look at your financials or your sales pipeline, you need to schedule time to revisit your logo. This is especially true if you’re an entrepreneur leading your own business. After all, you evolve over time – why wouldn’t your logo need to evolve as well?

There are a few key reasons you might need to update your logo:

• It doesn’t fit who you work with today. Maybe when you started your business you wanted to appeal to large companies, so your logo was designed to appeal to them. Or you started selling at Farmer’s Markets but now you’re in grocery stores where a customer has seconds to devote to learning about you instead of that lovely chat at the Farmer’s Market.
• It doesn’t fit your current marketing channels. There are some pragmatic decisions to make when it comes to what works on websites, what fits on packaging or what adapts to social media. You might discover that a horizontal logo literally doesn’t fit on your packaging or that the bright red of your logo doesn’t look so great on your website.
• It doesn’t fit what you or your business are today. This is the most important one, but often is the hardest to identify. After all, we all change over time, but sometimes it’s so incremental that we don’t realize it’s happening. Maybe the informal look you used at the start doesn’t fit the larger organization you’ve become or you’re shifting your business model and need something different.

However, there are also a few good reasons NOT to update your logo.

• You’re not making money. Changing a logo seems like an easy fix, but it can’t resolve foundational issues in your business such as high cost of goods, poor target audience identification or poor sales. Take time to dive into root causes of why you’re not getting the revenue you want before jumping to a new logo as the solution.
• Boredom. Let’s be honest – day to day management of a business can sometimes feel tedious and working on a new logo is a way to bring something new and creative to your days. But don’t let “shiny new object” temptations take your attention away from leading your business and making sure it’s running as well as it can.

If you do decide to revisit or redesign your logo, a big key to success – before you call the graphic design team or start brainstorming ideas – is to get input from stakeholders. Ask clients, colleagues, partners and friends for their input, or consider customer surveys and focus groups.

To help be sure your logo decisions align with your business strategy, give PhoneBox a call. We can help make sure that you’re on the right path and aren’t wasting your valuable time and resources.