When the Logo is the Business Itself!

Since the advent of conventional businesses, Logos have been there. Just like a human body has to have a face otherwise it looks odd, a business without a logo had always seemed incomplete. Irrespective of the size or scale of the business, the business had to have a logo, even if it meant to place the name of the business on a signboard outside. Logos were visual representations of a brand’s actual existence. They brought a brand to life and were an integral part of a firm’s brand identity,

But fast forward to 2017, things in the business world have changed rapidly and this transformation has brought numerous disruptions within the industry, especially in the sphere of branding and logos. Logos mean much more now than just branding collaterals as people have now developed an even deeper, more intricate relationship with them.

The world has moved on to the online realm and now people prefer to use their smartphones as the premier way of communicating with the world, even with businesses. And on these very smartphones, a brand’s logo is the now the brand itself.

Take out your smartphone right now and you’ll notice hundreds of symbols that your window to the services you need. From Twitter to Facebook to Snapchat to even Amazon, their logos are what you need to first dab on, if you want to go any further into using the services that these businesses offer. In the 21^st century world, every single customer who needs to use a certain service on a smartphone cannot bypass seeing or interacting a logo.

These actual physical interactions with the brand’s logos by audiences have raised the stakes for logos higher than they have been in history and the importance continues to grow exponentially.

Conventional branding strategies used to treat logos as something that they needed to have for the purpose of making the audience look at them as a visual personification or a face of the brand and for that purpose logos used to be placed everywhere from company notepads to billboards and even on promo products, but things stand completely changed now.

Let’s explain the “Immense power” of this phenomenon further:

When a logo didn’t have a certain degree of physical interactions involved, their effect on the user was far less. The logos of today, which you can click, dap, tap and pinch on, amplify the usefulness that a user finds in that logo being there.

There is a difference between Facebook’s logo being placed on a billboard, which you can just look at and Facebook’s logo that you can actually tap and enter into Facebook itself.

The unprecedented number of users that online businesses have amassed in recent years and the mind-boggling financial valuations that they have amassed, have been contributed in large part to the power of these logos being part of the user’s overall experience in a certain interaction with that very business, and that’s where the importance of having a good quality and tastefully designed logo has increased.

With consumers carrying hundreds of brand icons within their pockets each day, businesses and marketers need to ponder over the power that a good quality logo now begets.

These new, interactive, Logos make sure that there is a certain “Face” for the brand that could pop up in the consumer’s mind when a brand is mentioned or they could be reminded of the brand after seeing a logo, all for one purpose, i.e. to get the consumer to click on the logo to enter the business. Logos have become essential for 21^st-century businesses as they are now intertwined with them. A bad logo would never see your app is downloaded from the app store, no matter how great your services are. If you want success for your business, you now need a great logo that people love, so that it can become synonymous with the business you do and bring in customers.

Snapchat’s logo is Snapchat itself. It’s how Snapchat users remember Snapchat and the best part is that this phenomenon is also quite infectious and sticky. As your brand becomes famous through your logo, more and more people start recognizing it, which leads to greater number of consumers coming in each day.

And this logo phenomenon now transcends firms who solely exist online. Even the businesses that exist just physically need to look out for grabbing more consumers through the vast outreaching power of the online world by having unique brand identifiers like a great logo, and if they don’t do so, don’t expect to see them around in the next couple of years.

To achieve success in the current, highly volatile business environment, you need to be aware of the latest trends and mindsets that prevail within the population that you intend to target, just like how logos stand transformed and now mean so much more to business and consumers, and then apply your own unique approaches to successfully utilize these very trends and mindsets to the eventual success of your business.