Your logo is useless scribble but don’t worry it doesn’t have to be! Your brand is more than just a logo.
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about a Coca Cola bottle? do you think about how cold it is? or the sound it makes when you open it up on a hot summer day? does reading these lines kind of make you crave for one perhaps?
Create a feeling with your brand
One of the goals of a logo is to create a feeling. it is to make you feel a certain way. You want to initiate a certain feeling which you want to convey to your customers. This brand identification has been proven time and time again in various research papers showing the importance of consumer-brand identifications in building brand relationships. It is very important for any brand/company to find what connection they want to have with their customers. Do you want to come across as safe or do you want to make them feel happy when they think of your company?
Some questions you might ask yourself are:
- Who am I as a company?
- What feeling do I want to radiate?
- Who is my target audience?
- What are my short term objectives?
- What are my long term objectives?
- What demographic am I targeting?
- What psychographic am I targeting?
So how to more prominent brands go about doing this? Most brands do this in an elegant way which we overlook, some do it less elegant and say it out loud as part of their catchphrase.
Always Coca Cola
One of my all-time favourite brands is hands down Coca Cola. This is a perfect case where the brand is more than just a logo. This is one of the few brands that has successfully reinvented itself over and over again. I won’t dive too much into the psychology behind the catchphrase “Always Coca Cola”, but the phrase in itself plants a little “request” into your subconscious part of the brain to associate any query about a beverage to be answered with “Always Coca Cola” as opposed to another random beverage.
Another iconic branding strategy Coca Cola has adopted throughout the years is Christmas’s association with its brand. Even the colour red conveniently suits the strategy alongside the happy feeling everyone has associated with Christmas. Every year during Christmas you will see ads everywhere with the big red Coca Cola truck while playing the song;
Whenever there’s is fun there’s always Coca Cola
Joey Diggs
So Coca Cola is clearly trying to convey a feeling of happiness when you drink their beverages, which is partly true because well….. who doesn’t get happy with a big sugar shot (I would know since I’m writing this with a bottle of it next to me).
Discover your feeling
So your logo on its own is indeed very much useless if it does not contain a message, so what feeling does your brand convey to your customer base? Because the logo’s of Coca Cola, Macdonalds, Nike, and all of them are not that “fancy” independently. They tell a story, they create a feeling. Everyone can put a sign with a burger on it to tell people here is a burger place. What sets the burger place apart from the rest is the feeling you can give to your customers when they order that burger from you instead of the competitor.