What is a brand?  By its definition, a marketing brand is the symbol or image that represents your breadth of services or products and causes a positive and controlled memory to happen in the intended customer’s minds.  Establishing your brand is both a creative and strategic exercise that includes evaluating all service and product offerings from your company and how the customer needs to experience them.  The brand can begin with a simple logo, but it goes deeper than that.  The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. The brand represents the intangible assets of your company as well.  What about your service policy, your ethics, your mission statement, and the way you want your customers to perceive your service?  Those matter too.  Branding is a sophisticated exercise and one we would suggest hiring outside agency help to help you develop deep branding strategies and statements.

What is a logo?  Your logo does much more than stands for your company, product or service.  Your logo can trigger emotions, create a need or desire, and make people react.  Logos should be timeless and last for the lifetime of a business, while the elements that a logo complements (business cards, letterhead, brochures, web pages, etc.), can change and evolve as you change and evolve your company.  The mission of your logo is to portray the values and goals of your company. Make sure that these are clearly established before venturing out to find a graphic designer. You can do this effectively by recognizing the role that your logo plays in your branding strategy.  Before beginning the process of logo creation, be sure that you have developed your brand strategy. Why? Your logo is like a small ad for your company, without the strategy behind it a logo can put across the wrong message and in return weaken your strategy.  You want to keep your brand message consistent to help increase consumer recognition.  Your logo should reflect professionalism and growth no matter how small your company is.

Make sure that the logo you select is not dated but can be used effectively year after year. Keep in mind it is how consumers will recognize your company.