If you have a business, your goal should be to become the number one choice for all your customers. An important part of actually achieving this is by creating a strong brand and image. One important element of branding is to have a strong corporate logo. Naturally, you also have to have such things as values and a mission statement, but these have to be reflected in your logo as well. Indeed, you want to make sure that just by looking at your logo, your customers will know what to expect. Having a good logo has to be part of your branding strategy, but this is a hugely complicated thing to get right. How do you create something that everybody recognizes, such as the Nike tick or the McDonald’s M? After all, neither of those two logos actually have anything to do with the product they deliver, yet everybody recognizes them and know what they stand for.

“Confident branding and a strong branding strategy uses design to communicate a message that attracts the target audience that you want to attract – a message that creates confidence in your brand while differentiating between you and your competitors.”

This is what your logo has to achieve. However, this also means that the logo is actually at the end of your branding strategy. You first have to know what your company actually stands for. You need to know what your values are and what message you are trying to convey.

Your Logo Is Not Your Brand

One very important thing to remember as well is that your logo is not your brand. The logo is only a single piece in your entire branding strategy and is a visual representation of your brand as a whole. This is a complicated distinction, but one that you must be able to make.

“Your logo is only one piece of your branding strategy. Your logo is a symbol that can provide consumers with instant and powerful brand recognition of your business and the services or products that you offer.”

Your branding strategy as a whole should include a whole host of other things as well. Some of these things are about design, such as corporate colors, fonts and font sizes and graphic design. However, a lot of it is also about such issues as customer service, product excellence and so on.

Emotional Attachment

The goal of a logo is to create some form of emotional attachment. This is how the Nike logo works. As a company, they want to be associated with the world’s greatest athletes. What they hope is that when you see or use their products, you also feel this attachment to top athletes. What they would like, and have achieved, is for famous athletes to wear their products, so that their customers then feel as if they are just like their favorite athlete. This is something a strong logo, and a strong branding strategy sets out to achieve.

Designing Your Logo

Most companies will bring in a professional graphic designer in order to design their logo. It is very important that good discussions are held with this professional in order to get the logo right. For instance, the role of color cannot be denied and you must make sure that the color of your logo represents your values.

“Blue; a color that symbolizes professionalism and gives an executive touch to the logo. Orange and yellow depict energy! These colors radiate light.”

Once you have created your logo, the final step in your branding strategy’s action plan is to get it out there. This means putting it on absolutely everything you can come across.