Checklist : Logo, Logo Design, DIY or Hire a Professional / Agency – Part 2

Welcome back to the 3G’s & MHO Checklist Series. 

This is Part 2 in our series looking at logos and more specifically company logos, brand logos and product logos, for use wherever a logo will add value, including but not limited to your Facebook logo, Instagram logo, Twitter logo, LinkedIn logo, website logo, anywhere the business logo can be used to represent your business / organization, ensure recognition, facilitate recollection, illicit positive association, and help drive sought after action.

Picking up from part 1 (which you can access at https://www.3gs.co.za/checklist-logo-logo-design-diy-or-hire-a-professional-agency-part-1/), a core function of your logo is to drive recognition and recollection – making sure people recognize your logo as belonging to your business /organization when they see it, and remember who your business is – thus avoiding it (and hence your business / organization) being forgettable. 

Various factors contribute to facilitating recognition and recollection, with one of the most effective being story-telling. Story-telling? Wait! What? Why? When? How?

The what is, your logo needs to enable you to tell a story, a story unique to your business / organization. Connecting the story about your business / organisation / service / product / offering  to your business / organisation, and to your logo. 

The why is, people remember stories much longer than they remember details and facts, that’s a fact! The extent of the fact: 

Data told as a story is more memorable than on it’s own, research finds. Stories are twenty two times more memorable than facts alone. Throughout history, storytelling has been a proven to be a powerful delivery mechanism for sharing insights and ideas in a memorable, persuasive and engaging way.

Note: In sourcing this fact, I used a search engine to search for “is it a fact that people remember stories longer than facts”.

The when, well there are a couple of those:

• Firstly, before the creation of a logo, you should know the story about your business / organization.
• Secondly, and still before the creation of a logo, ensure that this story is part of the logo brief (whether you are creating the logo yourself, or you employ a professional or agency to do so)
• Thirdly, and again, still before the creation of a logo, try and envisage how the logo will enable the telling of the whole story, or only the part(s) of the story relevant to the opportunity at hand and what the audience receiving your logo and story is after / needs.
• Then, find ways (as many ways as reasonable, possible and viable to your business / organization and its considerations, circumstances and environment) to tell your story when people are exposed to your logo (and brand, which the logo forms part of)
• And there are others, but I think the point is sufficiently made for now.

The how, for that I will once-again use an example where I cover various aspects of this article and even different / multiple applications of story-telling.

So taking a look at an actual logo example that we did. Let’s look at 3G’s – as a second glance at our logo – and see how it measures up to part 2 of this series.

3G’s was founded, like so many businesses, under pressures of an extremely tight timeline. Ours wasn’t all dark and gloomy, but it wasn’t exactly planned and prepared for over a period of time prior to coming into existence. We had to do this properly, but we had to do it quickly.

• There was a group of people that found ourselves unemployed within the same timeframe
• Within this group, there were three of us that had complimentary skills for what was to become 3G’s Digital Consulting (later 3G’s Branding, Consulting, Design)
• I had clients that still needed work to be done, and imminently so.
• So we looked inward
  • “Know who you are” because at the end of the day you are going to be the living embodiment of the brand
  • You need to know who/what you are before you can position yourself relative to others, or relative to alternatives out there
  • We knew what products and services we were going to market with based on where we were at, at the time, but we also wanted to set a platform from which we could grow and develop without necessarily needing to rebrand completely – there were already ideas forming for the future, but we had to focus on getting off the ground first, and do it now
  • There was 3 of us
  • We happened to all be male
  • And the intention was that we would be the three primary faces of the business in our respective areas
  • So a part of the formulation of our brand, which is also the tongue-in-cheek aspect of our branding, is 3G’s for 3 Guys
• Looking outward, there was quite a bit more to consider
  • Naming trends in the communication / design industry at large at the time
    • Names (which I am tweaking slightly in consideration of the parties involved) like purple tomato, happy frog, green ostrich, agent cogg etc. 
    • The type of names that we had to stand out from
    • The type of names that we believe though creative and probably enabling a story, did not say what the business does without the use of a tagline – a tagline being what we wanted to retain use of for another purpose – our brand promise
  • We wanted to be ranked on search engines as high possible as quickly as possible for a business that was the size of ours, and having a more limited set of tools than is currently available to digital marketing as it did not exist at the time, we had to leverage what was available to us as best we could
    • A search engine at the end of the day is a giant indexing system, and in its simpler form, as it was back then, alpha-numeric had a larger impact, with numbers coming up first for otherwise identical entities
      • So we wanted a name that started with a number
    • We knew that if we could leverage search engine momentum being created by others, from their budget – seen as ours was non-existent – to our benefit, without infringing on them, and for which our potential target market had developed an appetite to search, it would help drive our visibility and hence brand awareness exactly amongst whom we wanted it to be
      • The big buzz from a technology perspective that was widely being marketed to companies and individuals alike at the time, and for which there was significant search activity, was related to local mobile networks, all who were pushing that then new uber network – 3G connectivity.
      • But we also knew they would move on to 4G, 5G and whatever else, which would leave the 3G space to be occupied by us when we were more established and they had moved on.
      • See how this is starting to come together? 
  • Because of what was happening in terms of the internet and its broader adoption in the early days, certain associated icons / symbols at the time were creeping into, and ever-expanding their presence in, day-to-day language and conversations. People where engaging with the concept of “dot”, and it was still very novel at the time
    • It also so happened that the initial primary focus of our offering to clients was very much tied to the internet
    • But “the dot” also had other existing connotations that we wanted to leverage
      • Being on point
      • Leaving nothing incomplete as a sentence, a paragraph, and even a story or factual account of things mostly ends in a full-stop, also referred to as a “dot”
    • So yes, we wanted a dot in our logo
• Looking Inward/Outward
  • Factors that not only bridged the inward perspective and the outward perspective, but that did so significantly in each space 
  • Colouration
    • Silver grey is associated with cutting edge, futuristic, clean, calculated, effective, clinical
      • Much like part of who we are as individuals as well as what we bring to the business, and in turn what the business offers our clientele
    • Our orange derivative is warm, slightly fuzzy, cosy, slightly earthy, trusting, yet energetic and contributes to where growth can occur 
      • Speaking to each of our creative souls, and again what 3G’s brings to the table
    • Black, and how we play with different tones of black in various places
      • Its definitive 
      • Balance
      • Solid
      • Unwavering
      • It again is reflective of who we are and what we do
    • The combination and specifics of the variations that we employed helped us position ourselves in a relevant way, but one that also differentiates us. 
    • But it also happens to be colours that were amongst the favourite colours of all three of the G’s
  • In addition to a symbol, we wanted our logo to say what we did as a business. But also to do so in a manner that would allow us to migrate our name as we evolved our service without doing so disjointedly, and without us having to abandon the symbol portion of our logo. So we included the words digital consulting in it.
  • We wanted to make our brand promise part of our logo
    • Firstly so that we could position who we are and what we offer
    • Secondly to help position us against any competitor that our target audience was considering
    • To align ourselves to the aspirational aspect of our target audience 
    • Expect more from your communication

And so 3G’s Digital Consulting was born, well a logo concept and part of the foundation of our ethos and branding in any event

But that is not where it ended. We then started to look at the migration of our logo as it aligned to the evolution of our business. But this will be a topic for another post.

But can we say that now you know more about 3G’s, are more likely to remember 3G’s as well?

So what are your thoughts? Possibly considering some of these aspects of your logo?

Well, that was Part 2. There will be more to follow when we pick up on our logo migration to more accurately reflect the evolution of our business. You are welcome to access the balance of our articles and other posts. Likewise you are welcome to reach out to us should you want to engage directly with us on this. 

Salubrious marketing!

And…….. Expect more from your communication

#3Gs #3GsDigital #branding #consulting #digital #design #development #maintenance #digicards #socialmedia #website #ecommerce #intranet #extranet #logo #logodesign #MarketingHeadOutsource