“Let’s talk about your logo.”

This is often either the shortest or the longest conversation we will ever have with any of our clients.

In the shortest version, the response is simply, “no.”

Slightly longer versions of this include, “that’s not up for discussion,” “we’re not changing the logo,” and, my favorite, “we’ve spent the last XX-years getting our logo out there. It’s too well known to mess with now.”

This reaction is largely common because many organizations believe, rightly or wrongly, that the very heart of their brand lives and dies with their logo.

Many lives have been lost on the battlefield of “are you married to that logo” and the scars of failed campaigns can last an entire career.

Let me be clear. The harsh reactions that organizations have to the idea of touching the logo are not without cause. Every single designer I have ever worked with, the moment they walk into the door, have no greater desire than to change the logo.

When it comes to logos, designers are like a persistent boyfriend trying to score… “If you really love me, you’ll let me…” As if changing the logo is the pinnacle of the agency/client relationship.

All of this, of course, wraps back to the reason why logos are the sacred cows of many organizations. That’s because many organizations believe that their logo IS their brand.

And this brings us to a different question:

What is a brand?

As simply as this could be stated, a brand is the emotional connection that a target audience forms toward a product, service, or organization.

What this means is that the target audience creates your brand. You manage it.

They form emotional connections based on all of the various things that your organization means to them. Every time an audience comes in contact with your organization, through any means, their emotional connections are either validated or negated.

Those contact points… For the most part, those are what you can control. The emotional connection; that’s your brand.

So… what is a logo?

A logo is a symbol that reminds your audience of all those emotions they have for your product, service, or organization.

What makes for a good logo? The greatest logos in history are those that compel audiences to conjure up the strongest and most compelling emotions with the least amount of thinking.

Too many times, though, organizations create (or maintain) a logo with the goal that it alone, separate from any other experience, will independently carry a host of meaning that they would like their target audience to assign to the product, service, or organization.

1976 Apple Computing Logo

As a young Steve Jobs quickly realized, this doesn’t work.

The most difficult bridge for most organizations is this one: the realization that your logo is not a primary vehicle to convey information about your product, service, or organization. Instead, your logo is an instant and powerful reminder of all the other ways your audience has already connected with your product, service, or organization.

Most people can assent to this idea intellectually. The hang-up comes when the implications of this thinking are spelled out:

The primary audience for your logo are those who already have a connection with you.

The primary vehicle in helping them form that connection is your actual product or service. Other vehicles that can be used to help them form this connection include advertising, public relations, social media, packaging, events, public service, sponsorships, etc. This means that the logo is not a promise. It doesn’t pre-tell you what a company is about. Instead, it’s a reminder. It points back to those emotional connections that galvanize what a company already means to you.

The stronger your audience’s connection to you, the less information they will need to remind them of that connection.

This is why, when it comes to logo design, the strongest brands on the planet evolve their logo through reduction.

The reason we see this gradual progression toward minimalist logo design is because the longer an organization is around, the more people know about that organization. The more people know about the organization, the less information they need to be reminded about the qualities of that organization.

The “Holy Grail” for logo design, therefore, is to eventually land on something that is instantly recognizable, conveying a host of factual, historic and emotional information about the brand in the least amount of time, with the fewest number of elements.