Business Logo Creation

Lately I've been noticing a number of organizations sending out special brand communications that shout, "It's our 21th Anniversary" or "We Announce Our 8th Year in Business." And these aren't even major anniversaries like the ones that end in a zero or a five. Yet some marketers think they warrant a special communication to potential clients. Would you read that e-mail or newsletter? Do you have time?

Join the W.I.F.M. It's the most important radio station that I know of for smart marketers. And it stands for "What's In It For Me?" That's what you must always consider as you think about the reasons for sending out brand communications. Waste your possible customers' time and you may not get another chance to have their attention when you really do have something relevant to say. The most welcome communications offer valuable information that help people do their jobs better, more efficiently or more happily. Offer one of those things as part of your message and you will be welcomed back with open arms next time you reach out with a brand communication.

This past week, I was honored with an award for mentoring at a ceremony that included business and community leaders, students, other honorees and even the Lieutenant Governor. I walked in expecting to have fun and enjoy the honor of being a Finalist. Having my name called as one of the award Winners was quite unexpected. Because I had no expectation of winning, I was relaxed and I think I took in the appreciative congratulations completely and in the moment. Believe me, this has not always been my mode of operating in the past: I used to stress out over being competitive, comparing my winnings to others.

In brand communications, I'd compare this to thinking only about making the sale instead of enjoying the actual interaction or the followup. Building customer relationships, enjoying the experience with clients, getting to know what matters most to those you serve and taking the time to find out...these are all actually smart marketing integration tactics. One of the simplest ones is just saying "Thanks" to clients who have been loyal to you or who have just bought from you for the first time. If a customer has been a pleasure to work with, tell them. In the end, goodwill comes back in many forms.

If the answer to these two questions is yes, then this is your lucky day. Element Three is looking for a Creative Lead. What that means to us is someone who is both a talented designer and a strategic thinker. Someone who can mentor younger designers, present work to clients, integrate feedback into work and delegate when needed. If you think you have what it takes to inspire and implement great work and you are ready to join a close-knit team of people who do great work together, send your resume and recent work samples as a PDF to tiffany@discoverelementthree.com

Note to Reader: You may not be able to appreciate this post if you are a man or wear a size zero. All others, read on.

I was shopping online at Piperlime (something I do more often now that I have a little girl) checking out what the new styles and colors are for spring. Never one to resist a good sale, I clicked on this button:



When the page loaded and I saw a pair of skinny jeans, 60% off  and FINAL SALE - I thought to myself - are you COMPLETELY CRAZY? What girl would buy a pair of skinny jeans online that were FINAL SALE? Finding a great-fitting pair of regular jeans is a 1:100,000 odds of winning, finding a great pair skinny jeans? 1:1 million - if you're lucky.



It made me think. What would I feel comfortable buying at Final Sale and what makes that different from the jeans? And then I thought, when are the times when we make people feel like they are buying a pair of skinny jeans at final sale?

Most of the time, marketing is oriented towards aiding the sales process. It is about creating a connection with a strong brand, clearly articulating features and benefits of a product or service and making a complex story accessible and easy to understand. We must be aware; when doing marketing for ourselves at Element Three or working with one of our clients - that we don't present an offer that contains too much risk for the buyer. Clients and prospects will be turned off by the giant leap you are asking them to take. Offer a party shirt for $30 - something you can wear once, discard and not feel bad about it. To parallel business, it's like a free trial, a small project or an online demo.

I'm even fairly comfortable with risk - but Final Sale, Skinny Jeans? Are you crazy?

What about you, where in your business are you asking people to buy Final Sale, Skinny Jeans?

Pepsi decided NOT to run a Super Bowl ad this year. What a great idea! By not running an ad after doing so for more than two decades, they actually got more press than if they had run an ad.

The good news is that Pepsi instead is giving $20 million away in a social media project called Pepsi Refresh. Some of my design students have already entered their project work for not local for profit agencies hoping to receive funding. It's a smart move on Pepsi's part. My students and their generation are among the most involved generation of socially conscious and engaged people in recent memory and they're more likely to align with a brand that actively supports their causes than one that throws big money at television conglomerates.

What have you done through your brand communications lately to make the world a better place AND align with your brand's constituents?

The past few weeks I have been 'lunching' with different people, reconnecting in the New Year. Undoubtedly, one of the early topics is how 2010 is starting off for our Indianapolis marketing firm, Element Three, and what we learned in 2009.

I want to be certain that I don't forget what 2009 taught me; so, I thought it would be a good idea to write it down. We're not always given the option of whether or not we go through a difficult time, but we do have the option of deciding to learn from it.

This is what I learned in 2009:

1) Cash really is King. It's not just an old business adage. It is the fundamental lifeblood to any organization. Without it you cannot get the resources you need to produce your product, to market, to sell - to do anything. Access to cash allows you to move forward.

2) There is no substitute for experience, no matter how smart you are. I thought I knew a lot about business. Having my own business from the age of 15 and growing up in a very entrepreneurial home - I have been around business for a long time. I've been told about lean times and hard seasons, and lived through them as the child of an entrepreneur - but never lived through it as a business owner. I will be more prudent as a result of 2009; in my spending and my decision-making. Both personally and professionally.

3) The greatest gift someone can ever give you, is forgiveness. I made some bad decisions in 2009 that had an adverse impact on the Element Three team. To receive forgiveness from those I hurt was an incredibly humbling experience. I hope that I will have the grace to extend such forgiveness to others. For their forgiveness, I am eternally grateful.

4) Good companies go out of business. In my naivete, I thought only bad companies went out of business. That only crappy companies with crappy products and services were the ones that didn't make it. Not so. Many great companies cannot make it through seasons like 2009 because they're not capitalized well, they have big client pull back, inventory levels that are too high or just are not ready to throw their life savings into the company to get it through the rough patch. There were some great companies and great people who were casualties of 2009. We're immensely thankful we were not one of them.

5) In tough times, you have to Decide. You have to decide you want to survive. 2009 taught me that in tough times you cannot be ruled by your emotions, because emotions cannot be trusted. You have to decide you're going to get out of bed in the morning, because you're probably not going to feel like it. You have to decide you are going to make the tough phone calls and that you're going to be honest with yourself about the difficult decisions that have to be made to keep the organization alive. You're not going to feel like laying people off. You're not going to feel like making cold calls. You have to Decide you're going to.

In a crazy way, I'm thankful for 2009. It made me grow up in ways a better economy might not have and it made me more thankful for my family, my husband and my daughter.

I'm curious, what did 2009 teach you? Did you decide to learn from it?

The Indianapolis based company, SGI, is looking to hire an additional Account Coordinator. Our Indianapolis Marketing firm, Element Three, has done work for SGI (we redesigned their logo and helped articulate their brand position). SGI is a stable company with strong leadership.

For more information on the position, click here. Interested parties should forward their resume to Jack Burns, jburns@mysgi.com. This is an entry level position for someone a couple of years out of college. Experience is not necessary.

Many talented marketers wonder why the work they get from their design firms and ad agency partners doesn't stack up to their expectations, both creatively and strategically. One place to start if you want to build powerful, focused brand communications, is with your creative brief. At Element Three, we have developed a thorough creative brief format that assures that the fundamental questions of WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY and HOW get answered. It's true that most Indianapolis ad agencies have a creative job starter form of some kind. And the form alone won't assure that you get great work. The focus and finesse of the people who work with the form, however, will.

Some tips:

Demand focus in the objective for the communications.

Demand that a specific audience be outlined in the brief. You cannot speak effectively to everyone.

Expect to see specific, salient insights into that audience's lifestyle, values and demographics outlined in the brief.

Insist on a single-minded, unique main message. You cannot make great brand communications without it.

We like to agree on where and how the communications will show up. We also like to assure that there will be a specific call to action for the audience to make sure your brand communications get a real response. Contact Tiffany Sauder at tiffany@discoverelementthree if you'd like us to craft a powerful creative brief for your brand communications! It will make all the difference in the creative you hold in your hand in the end.

A logo is a logo is a logo, right? Yet some logos seem to be created more equal than others!

I was recently asked, "What's the most recognizable logo?" After some research, I haven't yet found a definitive list but a variety of lists based on various peoples' opinions. Here, however, are the names that show up again and again.

CocaCola / Coke
Pepsi
Nike
Ford
Chevrolet
Mercedes Benz
Virgin
Target
McDonalds
Google
CBS
Apple

If you'd like to challenge this list or add others to it, please feel free to do so here!

I just attended a seminar in which I sat in on a talk by an ex-CIA agent. The agent discussed the espionage stories she recalled in which creativity was at the core of each example's success. Core to the talk was the premise, repeated many times, that, "Of course, creativity cannot be learned. Either your mind works in quirky ways or it doesn't." The presenter went on to put down anyone who made money giving seminars on "how to be more creative, because as we all know, that's a bunch of bullcrap." (Her words, not mine.)

Listening to this discussion of creativity made me squirm in my chair. For over 20 years, I've essentially been teaching professionals and students to be more creative....successfully. In fact, Jonathan Plucker, Educational Psychology professor at IU in Bloomington, teaches and studies creativity. He says that there are many myths about creativity and that there are a number of things we can all do to boost our creativity. In fact, his students DO learn to be more creative. Plucker says, "If you believe that creativity techniques will work for you, they probably will."

Quirky creativity? That's one way of looking at it. But for those of us who make our living being creative on budget, on time and on strategy, it's anything but quirky. The creative problem solving process can be tracked (and has been: see Min Basadur's Simplex creative problem solving process chart).

Our brains, in this age of information, must be kept flexible, just like our bodies. Tom Monahan, founder of Before and After, is a brain trainer. He regularly teaches methods for stretching your brain to be more flexible and creative. I teach some of his techniques to my students at Herron School of Art and Design and I see many wonderful results from students – who often amaze even themselves.

So no matter what you do, whether it involves creating brand communications or doing tax consulting, you CAN learn to be more creative!

This week we launched two new websites for Element Three clients.

The first is for GEMMS, a company that sells software exclusively to cardiologists. Element Three was responsible for the design, search engine optimized content and site-map. We partnered with Hanapin Marketing to complete the programming of the site. Click here to view the site.



The second site that went live this week functions as a landing page. This client, DeHart Benefit Solutions, is an independent strategic partner for AGIS. DeHart Benefit Solutions needed to link into the AGIS content - yet also have their own distinct brand. You will see the DeHart brand represented on the landing page, and then the AGIS brand is dominant on the subsequent pages.  Click here to view the site.

Element Three completed the design, content and layout of the landing page. We also were responsible for the design of the logo, company name and brand development with this client. We partnered with Bitwise Solutions to complete the programming.

Logo creation services are us. Yes, like many other creative service firms, Element Three offers identity design as part of its scope of services. Yet a logo does not equal a brand. The two words are so often interchanged that it's worth taking the time to stop and reflect on the differences.

A logo is like shorthand for the essence of your organization's offering. It's the flag at the top of the mountain that is your brand. Because of this, it's the most obvious thing that everyone (marketers and consumers) think of when they think of your brand. Your brand, on the other hand, lives and breathes in the minds of your customers, your strategic partners, your competition and your internal audiences. It is the promise your organization represents.

Your brand can be brought to life through a myriad of things including your logo, your communications, your employees' actions and attitudes, your physical structure, products, signage, vehicles, buildings, interiors, clothing, services and systems. Take this altogether and you have what Tom Peters calls "The Brand Experience". This is a more holistic way to think about your brand. Everything your brand does and says affects the brand in the mind of your constituents. So hire us to design your logo. We'll be happy to do it. We'll also ask you about what it actually stands for.

This has been a desperately tough time for many designers, writers, creative directors, photographers, art directors, music composers, and on and on. The convergence of electronic, automatic solutions to creative needs combined with the downward spiral of the economy has created a perfect storm. Marketers are opting to spend less, hire less and re-use more. And I'm all for being smart about strategic marketing planning and getting the highest possible return on marketing investment.

If you read Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind, you already know his prediction that we are rapidly moving through the information age into the conceptual age. The best way to win in any kind of economy is to have bigger, better ideas in the face of sameness. That's something you won't be able to find for $150 on the internet because that's where millions of others are looking, too. So those of us creative folk who do have work, lucky as we are, have to work extra hard to get all the work done with fewer colleagues. And we have to keep proving the value of our original ideas, every day. The less we count on existing ideas, the more successful our clients will be, making more opportunities for more creative minds eventually. So it's a vicious or wonderful cycle, depending on which way we choose to go.

Originality rules.

I watched Governor Mitch Daniels State of the State Address this week.  I was interested in hearing how he would chose to address the highs and the lows of Indiana's performance over the past year.  While acknowledging the challenges faced by our state and the residents who live here, he also took some time to put those challenges into perspective. Indiana has successes that are worth noting and celebrating.

It got me thinking about Indiana and even Hoosiers as a brand.  States definitely need to clearly articulate their unique selling points when pitching themselves as a place to do business to the outside world.  I imagine the average Hoosier, if asked, would describe Hoosiers as hard-working, value-centered, and relatively conservative.  While that may or may not be an accurate description, those are not the unique selling points that differentiate our great state.  At least not in terms that matter when pitching Indiana to newcomers.

From an economic development standpoint, what I heard about Indiana is:

• Affordable housing

• Fiscally sound

•  Progressive posture on taxes

 

After the rough and tumble year of 2009, I am still receiving holiday greetings from unemployed colleagues who used to be full up with national and international work in advertising. My friends range from advertising agency broadcast producers and creative directors in the car industry (yikes!) to international agency HR directors to agency account executives. Notice the common word "agency" as in "advertising agency". There will always be the need for persuasive brand communication...yet I wonder if the classic advertising agency is the model for the future. Most smart marketers we work with at Element Three are looking for integrated marketing across all their brand communications, whether that is advertising, social networking, events marketing, product or package design or service delivery. When you define yourself as being able to deliver only one-way messages rather than an entire brand experience, it's no doubt that things have dried up. On the other hand, folks who can deliver integrated marketing seem to be on the recovery side of the recession–and rightly so.

What's your experience?

I've been noticing all the press lately about how unique it is that Avatar, the recent electronically created film, was actually an original creation. It wasn't based on a book, an earlier movie or an existing story or legend. In a way, this is a sad comment on the film industry and on the state of the creative arts in our culture. The spread of interactive technology has made copycat creativity easy and inexpensive in our field and other creative fields. Conglomerating existing works does not make for a fresh concept.

Logo creation services for $1.50 abound on the Web. So do easy Web site creation sites. It's not automatic – but coming up with concepts that are especially relevant to your brand's unique point of difference, your changing market and to your audience's needs is a must in today's competitive marketplace. The new new thing: original ideas, created for the first time just for your brand.

As our company gathered for our holiday party, we toasted the season. We also toasted the end of 2009...and it can't come too soon. It's been a tough year for so many in and out of our industry. Indianapolis ad agencies larger and more established than ours threw in the towel this past year. We've seen an unprecedented number of resumes making their rounds and many friends contacting us asking if we have work. We've felt the tight budgets our clients must live by as a result of the uber recession. We feel very fortunate to still be in business, working with a wonderful, diverse mix of clients. Our team is strong and we enjoy working together.

So here's to a better year for all in 2010. May it leave us all more prosperous and able to support ourselves and our families.

After spending two days this past week driving through sleet, rain and snow to visit my family two states away, I am convinced that there must be better ways for us to travel in these wintery conditions. This is a short rant.

We've put men on the moon.
We've cured cancers.
Car designers, if you're reading, please tackle winter driving...beyond antilock brakes, all wheel drive and snow tires.

This white knuckle stuff has got to stop!

Really? Air quality?

This headline/ article below was featured in Inside Indiana Business' daily e-newsletter.


How about the fact that Indiana ranks high in obesity? Or the fact that we have an incredibly high rate of our population that smokes and the unemployment rate in some of our counties is the highest in the nation? And, to add to our grumpy state, our inner-city public school system graduates <50% of high-school Seniors.

How about we focus on things we can change to improve our 'Happiness' level instead of pointing to things like congestion and air quality.

Why am I so bugged that someone spent time researching why we're unhappy? I tell you what makes this Hoosier grumpy - is when people point to random, external factors that contributed to their current state of affairs.