Designers and marketing experts all bow down to Nike, Apple, and others due to their great branding that has lead to their success…Don’t make that mistake.
The logos we all know and love are not the logos companies had as successful start-ups. Apple’s original logo was Newton sitting under a tree. Nike was a brand created for an already existing shoe company, not a start-up company. Walmart, Exxon, Toyota can be considered successful start-ups (they are fortune 10 companies now), but they didn’t start with the branding we know today.
The great logo success stories are re-branding efforts of already successful companies. IBM could afford to pay for their branding because they were a big company…like all of the logos we know and love.
OK, I’m talking to start-up businesses here and cautioning against spending too much of your capital upfront on branding before you have a company. Sure, there are businesses like clothing lines where your company is a brand, those are different.
Kozmo spent a pretty penny on their branding. The reason we don’t applaud this logo is that the company went belly up. How could that happen? They had a great brand.
A new company needs to present itself as professional. A new company needs to be flexible. If your focus changes you better hope your branding can change. Any marketer who tells you that you need to spend a huge budget on branding to avoid a costly rebranding process, just point out that you would rather be Apple than Kozmo. They did have a nice logo for a start-up.
