Are you a digital ready marketer?

In this blog, I am talking about your branding.

A lot of marketers defend their company branding fiercely with strict guidelines on colours, design of their logos, font type and size in order to create an identity for the company.

The logo is particularly fiercely defended. Aside from colours, design and aspect ratios, the minimum space around it is often defined as well. While in traditional print collateral or ads, you could control all these. When you move to the digital space, situations change.

The digital space poses big challenges to your logo. Social media crop your logo into all sorts of shapes and sizes - round, square and rectangles of varying aspect ratios. The favicon on your website would appear so tiny that any logo with more than 2 letters on it are going to look fuzzy. Favicon is the logo that appears on the tab on the top line of your website. Your ads on social media and search engines may face similar problems. With a lot of traditional logos, they either become fuzzy or get cropped in the wrong places.

Facebook and LinkedIn did great jobs with their logos - with only a 'f' and 'in' respectively as logos. You could hardly call these creative but they work well. As for Google, their favicon is only a 'G' although their main logo is 'Google' in a combination of 4 different primary colours. And they could have a variations of favicon for their different web products.

You have invested a lot in your brand identity and may not be about to throw away your existing logos. You can either tolerate the cropping or fuzziness, or exercise a lot of flexibility in adapting to the different situations, allowing for letters and elements on your logo to be moved or abbreviated for the different uses. And if you are very much into guidelines, you may have to start thinking about what adaptations you can allow and what must be included in the logos.

#digitalmarketing #branding #companylogo