The concept of branding was born in the course of evolution of the “business process”. During the next phase of evolution however, emerged the concept of corporate identity. Although often, the two terms—brand and corporate identity—are used interchangeably, they are two different concepts.

While brand relates to the emotional relationship between customer and a business, the corporate identity is all about the look and feel of the business. The latter helps a customer to distinguish his favorite brand from the crowd of other businesses.

The brand name evokes an emotion of trust and reliability, whereas the identity speaks of the product’s individual quality, its ethics and its focus. Two concepts are however interrelated; when the product is able to establish its unique identity, it is recognized as a brand.

When we think of the identity of a company the first thing that crosses our mind is the company logo. The logo is the unique icon that represents the company in the market, helps convey its business message to the customers and ultimately helps sell the product and services to them.

A custom logo can take your business far and accordingly you should be prepared to invest time and money into it.

So what are the main criteria of effective logo design?

Reflecting the essence of business through the logo: An experienced logo designer knows the main areas of focus such as the target customers, the business goal of the company, the positive attributes of the company and so on. The designer creates the visual identity of the company by combining all these factors into a single graphic (if possible).

To bring out this essence, the designer uses a number of tools like font, color and/or symbols. For example, in order to make a logo for a bank, you should not add images of bank checks, the factor you should emphasize is the stability and trustworthiness of the bank. Just go through some of the leading banks of the world like Citibank, Standard Chartered etc and you will find how subtle use of color and simple typeface have beautifully incorporated this feel of reliability and consistency.

Lastly, creating an identity is not all; the logo is a part of a volatile business environment where things change constantly. The identity creation becomes a constant process. If a particular logo fails to bond with the customers in a satisfactory way, then consider a complete makeover of the logo.

We often ignore the volume of energy wastage in our daily intercourses with the electronic gadgets. But Phillips one of the trusted names in the global electrronic industry is determined to make the consumers take notice of this costly ignorance. This is the reason behind this electronic giant’s introduction of a new consumer logo for its eco friendly ‘Green Flagship’ product range - the Philips Green Tick. The Philips Green Tick logo will appear only on Green Flagship products in the Consumer Electronics portfolio, all of which are annually certified by external auditors.

On the first week of May, Philips Electronics had introduced this new consumer logo which is to be used exclusively on its range of environmentally friendly and safe consumer products that has been named, The Philips Green Tick. This new logo based on the theme of green hues, has been designed with the aim of conveying an environment friendly message to its customers. This logo has been created with an objective of attracting the consumer’s attention to the subject of energy wastage. In addition to the energy efficient usage of electronic gadgets, this new product range with this green logo is also to reflect the other environmental benefits such as the use of flame retardant materials.

The Philips products, bearing the Green Tick logo will help consumers distinguish between the ordinary products and these extremely energy efficient products that have been certified by external auditors as being 10 percent more energy-efficient than other products on the market. So when you watch your favorite show on the TV screen or watch the latest block buster on the DVD, think of the expensive energy that you just throw away. A Phillips product carrying the Green Tick logo comes with the guarantee that they consume lot less energy than its competitor products.

According to the company source, Philips Green product portfolio accounted for EUR 2.2 billion turnover in 2006. As of now, you will come across the Green Tick logo on 7 of Philips’ flat TVs. However, the company is on its way to double the number to 14 by the end of 2007. According to the company source, it will continue throughout the current year, the process of bringing the other electronic products under the umbrella of Green Tick logo and these products include DVD recorders, home theater systems, wireless solutions, portable accessories and other devices. The Green Tick logo has been launched into retail outlets since April 2007 across Europe, North America and Asia.

View and learn more about the Phillips Green Tick logo on http://www.newscenter.philips.com

What a logo has to do with the image of a town? Actually it has much to do and the proof lies in the recent incident relating to Warrington town near London where a logo change sparked off a hot public debate.

The event may appear to be insignificant for the people in the other parts of the world, but for those having interest in the field of logo designing, the Warrington incident has much significance—-it clearly shows how a logo becomes the part of identity of any establishment—commercial or non commercial and how a change in the logo stirs up identity crisis among some of them.

To realize the significance of logo in this light, we must learn what all those commotions were actually about. The town authority had decided to replace the age old logo of the town with an aim to represent the twenty first century character of the town. They were of the opinion that the new logo will uphold the image of the town which is based on a multicultural society. The old one however boasted of a historic design featuring a Coat of Arms and the legend of “Deus Dat Incrementum”.

To the stark contrast to the old logo, the newly designed logo is a simple one bearing its name written in Sans-serif font and two “swooshes”. These swooshes were inspired by wings of the Goddess of Nike who adorns the town’s famous Golden Gates.

These gates have great historical values; the gates were originally presented to Queen Victoria, who without accepting them in confusion immediately sent them back to Warrington. Since then, Golden Gates are the integral part of the town’s skyline. The designer of new Warrington logo seemed to be besieged by the protective power of Goddess Nike and that was what he tried to incorporate in his design.

The step of redesigning of town logo caused so much furor, that the mayor decided to have special meeting over the issue. Majority of Warringtoners are of the opinion that change in the logo amounts to an identity theft, where the rest of the residents are of the opinion that the new logo rightly reflects the contemporary character of the town.

It is not in the scope of this article to discuss whether or not this logo change is ethical and justified, but the incident clarifies one thing quite clearly— and that is the significance of a logo in common people’s life. People develop such a deep rooted connection with logos of their favorite belongings, that a change in their design causes them enough disturbances.

Yet, changes are inevitable and change is the part of life. Contemporization of logos is important. At first people are aghast to accept the change, but gradually they become habituated to their new identity and at some point of time they start to love their new identity too. So we hope, the new Warrington logo too will be accepted by the residents soon.

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Have you ever noticed, how interesting your chat on Yahoo or MSN IM becomes if your friend adds an image in the box? This is because we always like to interact with a specific identity and a face helps us to relate to that particular identity. This is because a face helps us to recognize a person, distinguish him/ her from others.

And it is this face that helps us to keep him/her in our minds.

A company logo is just like the image in the chat room— a good logo turns a mere name into a specific identity that business a visual identity to relate to.

Now having a face is not all. Everyday we come across so many faces—how many can we recall in the end of the day? Similarly, there are thousands of logos which we come across in our daily intercourse, but there are only a few which get imprinted in our minds for long.

Just think about some of the immortal logos of all time Adidas, Nike, McDonald or IBM. At a first glance they appear to be too simple. But this simple look is the result of a chain of complex procedures. The interesting point in all these is: simpler the logo, the stronger its message, the more it is memorable.

A memorable logo conjures up the face of a business establishment and it is this recognizable face that helps stand out your product or service from those of your competitors. At the very basic level, the face sends across some emotional message and that helps the client to connect to your brand. This is the first step of long lasting brand loyalty.

Simple they may look; but creation of good logos is a job of an expert. A professional logo designer is trained in the art of logo designing and he knows exactly which tools to use to bring out the essence of your business in a single piece of graphics. A trained designer has various tools at his disposal that are employed to fulfill the task. You break a logo into pieces and what you get are a few shapes, typographies and forms. You will also find colors and above all you will discover a specific style that brings the logo in life.

These are all the tools of logo making. Now the designer put the tools into use to create an image to interpret the client’s vision. They use a language to give expression to the thoughts of the client this is the language of shape and forms, where an arc represents connectivity, a curve suggests softness, circle reflects movement and so on.

They also speak the language of color, where green represents nature, where blue becomes the representative of professionalism and efficiency, red speaks of energy and dynamism. These tools and languages become eloquent in the hands of expert logo artist and the logo is born to give you recognition in the market. Thus a logo becomes a weapon in your hand to create an image before the world.

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How can you possibly protect such an intangible thing as creative idea? True there is IPR protection, copyright, trademark and so on. But can they stop plagiarism completely? It is impossible because you can not guarantee that two creative individuals in two corners of the world will always think differently. As such there might be elements of similarity in others’ works.

But what happens when two designs reflect the same characteristic features? Well, then the latter entrant in the scene is dragged into the court and made to pay the penalty for even an unintentional lift.

This is what happened recently in case of Redfin a Seattle based Real estate firm. It was last week of April and Redfin announced its identity makeover. (Source http://www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com)

The makeover announcement was coincided with their announcement about starting a new establishment in Boston. However, in the makeover process, the real estate website undergone complete change in the color scheme and acquired an all new logo.

The logo change was followed by the litigation threatened by Move.com (NASDAQ: MOVE). The Move.com holds that it has already a registered trademarked logo featuring a house inside the letter “o”. The original Redfin logo however featured the same approach of containing the house within a circle.

This time the logo for Redfin has been designed by Hornall Anderson Design Works. The new Redfin logo comprises an outline of a person under a tree that bears many house shaped fruits. The new website for the company has also been designed by the same design firm.

This redesign spree is expected to prove costly for the firm as now it has to revamp its web site, business cards and letterhead and in addition to that the “for sale” signs used in the construction sites.

However, it was noted by the company spokesperson that the entire move was out of compulsion, as Move.com had threatened to sue Redfin over its logo using the image of an encircled house. It has been acknowledged by the company, that the entire project was not “cheap”, though no exact figure was revealed.

While the newly designed website has been appreciated from the aspect of usability and functionality, the new logo failed to receive such accolades. Especially, the inclusion of fruit tree has been criticized on the ground that it looked incongruous in a Real Estate logo.

The company is planning to expand its business in the other parts of the continent especially towards the East coast. Let’s see, how the new logo contributes to the business growth of this Seattle online real estate startup.

Learn more about the new Redfin logo at:
http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/landing-page?uid=pr-rebrand

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