When bad logos happen to good people
Professional logo design £39. Yep you read it right. Not £3,900, not even £390. The cost of 4 bargain buckets from KFC will now bag you a logo. Not just one logo my friends, but “a choice of 6 from 3 qualified designers with unlimited revisions to any one design.” A cursory look at the website boasts a range of testimonials from absolutely no one willing to give their company name, apart from one company who, on looking, no longer seemed to exist.
All well and good if you’re a small local business simply looking for a quick and easy bit of branding for your Jam business. The worrying trend though is that the bargain bucket logo now seems to be seeping in to the professional world. A post on LinkedIn last week from an actual real life Marketing Director committed two cardinal sins in one. Not only had he crowdsourced a greasy bucket of logos, he was then asking the great and good of Linkedin to vote for the best. Oh for the halcyon days when we chuckled ironically along with Campaign Magazine when they asked ‘What would the chairman’s wife think?’ in their weekly ad review. Now it’s the whole damn family and their dog casting their judgement on a logo knocked up by some teenager on their mac book for £1.99.
Contrast this at the opposite end of the scale with those high-profile rebrands with the hefty price tags that have caught the headlines over the years (BP, London 2012 Olympics and the Beeb three amongst many) Add this to the misconception around the true value of quality branding, and you can see how crowdsourced design at knockdown prices over the internet has evolved.
There’s a more serious problem that underlying all this, and that’s the survival of SME marketing agencies. They’ve weathered two recessions (and now Brexit) plus the constant need to justify to clients the value in paying for quality brand thinking and design. A logo is not just a symbol, it’s an idea encompassing the very essence and philosophy of a brand. The logo is the tip of the iceberg with a raft of thinking, analysis, craft and skill underpinning it. Please leave the generic crowdsourced logos to the Jam makers and leave us agencies to craft quality branding based on insight that will stand the test of time.