As a designer one of the most common questions I get is “Can you make me a logo?”
Of course I can make a logo. I can scribble something together, stick your company name on it and call it a logo. Bam! That’ll be $1000 please. That’s what you asked for right? You didn’t ask for research or strategy, or colors, or anything else.
There are two kinds of people who ask for a logo. People who aren’t actually serious about growing a successful brand and just want the title of business owner, and people who don’t know how much more they can get from a qualified designer.
Research
Before building a brand, a good designer will do enough research to become an expert on you, your audience, your competition, and everything in between. When talking with a designer ask for research on the following BEFORE they start concepting.
- Ask for a detailed audit of your competitors’ brands. You don’t want your logo to look like everyone else’s. Where do theirs fall short? Are there opportunities to stand out?
- Tell your artist where you plan to use the logo. Social media, shirts, vehicle wraps, signs, websites, etc. You likely need more than one logo. You’ll need one best suited for each placement. Ask them how many logos you’ll likely need.
- What kind of logo would appeal to your audience? Would you hire a lawyer who had a bunch of cute curls and sparkles in their logo? Probably not. But you might hire a wedding cake designer with that logo. This question leads to the next point.
Audience profile
Often, I’ll ask something to the effect of “Do you want to target men or women?” And the answer is almost always “both”. That wasn’t the question though, was it? People are terrified of shrinking the size of their market. But let’s do an experiment.
- Dave’s Shop wants to target men and women between the ages of 18 and 60 at any income level.
- Cathy’s Shop wants to target women between the ages of 30 and 50 who live in a high income neighborhood. They are usually stay at home mothers, who often need to bring their children shopping with them. Her shoppers usually lean left politically, and are mostly white and Hispanic.
You don’t even know what Cathy sells, but I bet you already have an idea of how to talk to her audience. When you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.
So ask your designer to build you multiple in-depth audience profiles. This will help you discover exactly the type of branding you need.
Positioning
This is the game changer for most small brands, because most other small businesses don’t do this. Positioning is where your brand sits in the hearts and minds of your consumers, relative to your competitors.
Listerine positioned themselves as a strong brand. Saying things like “You can take it, germs can’t.” I remember being told, “If it burns, that means it’s working.” People ate that up.
Then Scope enters the picture. How are they going to compete with that? Are they also going to say they’re strong? Or Stronger? No. They looked at Listerine’s positioning and attacked it.
Scope: No more medicine breath.
It’s simple right? But it forces the user to choose between strength or medicine breath. Force your audience to make a choice.
When Mason & Magnolia Real Estate needed a brand, we looked at their competitor’s positioning. Their competition was the classic corporate and professional look. Big brands saying things like “Build on Advantage”, "Fulfilling the dream of home since 1906”, and “Where Entrepreneurs Thrive”. So how would a small company compete with that?
“The Southern Hospitality of Real Estate.” That’s how. Now their customers have to choose between big classic companies, or some southern hospitality.
So work with your designer to find how your competitors are positioning and how you will differentiate your brand.
Messaging
Which of these companies sells a tough fence built for Texas weather?
“🌟Call today to get a beautiful outdoor living space. Our fences come in all kinds of colors to accent your garden. Turn your backyard into an outdoor dreamscape!🌟”
“In Texas, A fence is more than just wood and nails. It’s the backdrop of life’s moments. Your fence needs to stand up to whatever life throws at it. Built for your family, by our family.” (Actual post from my client 4R Fences and Patios)
Your designer can build you a tone of voice. What to say and how you say it. They can give you example posts, headlines, emotions to evoke, and then what phrases to avoid. They know your audience at this point so they know how to talk to them. Your brand is more than a logo. It should have a personality. In the end, all brands are just people, treat them as such.
A Guide
After all of this, your designer can give you a comprehensive usage guide on your new brand. How to use your logos, what not to do with them, colors, fonts, patterns, graphics, etc. It’s important that you follow this guide too.
Brand consistency is so important. You want your brand to evoke the same emotion and have the same look and feel everywhere it shows up. Inconsistency will either confuse your audience, be less effective, or just make you look unprofessional. You worked hard to make this brand, protect it with your life.
Your designer can give you this guidebook containing everything we’ve covered so far. Print it out, bind it, laminate it, whatever you need to do. Treat it like your Bible.
How much should it cost?
The answer to this question is different for every business. How much do you think the Nike logo is worth? Billions right? But why? It’s a simple logo and the branding is powerful. But there are millions of other brands that are just as good but not worth as much. So why would a brand like Nike pay so much for branding?
Risk. Nike has more to lose if the logo is bad or if the branding doesn’t stick. They have to recall products, they buy millions of dollars worth of ads, they print their logo on everything. The repercussions would be maddening if people hated the logo.
So ask yourself what your risk is. You’re going to invest money in signs, business cards, shirts, a website, etc. How much would it cost you if that branding wasn’t effective? If the answer is not much then maybe you’re comfortable spending $500 on a young designer. Or maybe you plan to take out a $50,000 business loan and need to pay that off quickly. You can’t afford to have an ineffective brand. You won’t recover if your logo accidentally looks a little phallic. (You’d be surprised how often this happens.)
The important thing is that you try to get everything I’ve covered here and that your payment is enough to motivate the designer to do it all without the barrier of monitoring their hours. Sometimes branding takes a couple days. Sometimes it takes weeks. But you need them to invest time in the research.
Personally, I charge about $1500 to $2500 for everything I've mentioned here, depending on the risks. But I don’t just make logos, I make brands.
