|
In the last issue I talked of online branding and how brands like rediff.com and indiatimes.com have exploited the first mover advantage to position their brand. Well! as far as brand building is concerned, the emphasis on logo have experienced an increase in importance.
With the consumers becoming more educated and conscious, it has become imperative for brands to send out positive visual signals or messages. And a strong way to start is by having a logo - a strategically and visually communicative logo.
The increase in importance of corporate image and communication has forced even offline brands to rush to put strategy and thought into their earlier neglected logo.
Remember the old logo of TATA, the mechanical look of heavy truck
makers. With their shift to consumer driven products, they had incorporated
a more visually soothing logo. As makers of comfort cars ( Indica, Tata Safari
and Estate) and software developers, the new
logo compliment their image. Videocon, another consumer durable company took some eight years to have a logo in place company. In todays world that could be sacrilege.
Time, in term of years is nowadays an expensive luxury for e-Brands. Not only do e-brands need to reach
out and relate to people in the real world, but also they need to do it fast.
And a strategic way is to start off with a strong visual impact of the brand. A logo not only gives a website a face, but it also helps it also increases the TOM rating of the brand. In a world restricted by the 11inches / 7 inches screen of the computer, a logo aesthetically and efficiently represent the personality of the brand; considering the economy of space.
For
an online brand it is important to reach out to its consumer in the real world. And in the absence of tangible attribute, a logo comes to represent the aspiration, values that the brand stands for.
To develop a bondage (the stronger the bondage the greater the brand equity) with the consumers, the brand need to relate to them in the world they operate. They need a presence in the real world, where most of the brands exist in real life and to which the consumer can relate. In a scenario, where an online brand lack any tangible attributes, a logo can represent the face of the company, to which the consumer can reach out and relate in the real world.
Sometime back, I worked on a project for the economic development board of a country. An organization responsible for building and selling the image of the country to the big corporations of the world. Pitching the island country as an ideal destination for the emerging knowledge based industries. But here we were playing around with its logo, using all sorts of fonts from courier, comic to the San serif fonts. Finally, in a few hours the creative team came up with a logo that was miles away from communicating the dynamism of that island country. Well! It was not the first time that I saw companies confining such an important aspect of their corporate image to a few man-hours.
Brands operate in a real world and they also need to have a persona and a face. You can't let strangers or inexperienced people decide which face your company is going to have.
You need to see that, right from the colour to the font used convey an image that represents your company and reflects its aspirations and values.
Do
you remember the V of the Selvel, the matter-of-fact logo of Philips,
the dreamy and glamorised logo of Virgin?.
Or for that matter the playful logo of indiainfo.com,
the new indiatimes.com symbol celebrating the "I" or the sign of bazee.com
with the outstretched "z" edging you to stretch your luck or fortune.
It is the logo of planetcustomer.com,
which has captured very coolly what Sombit Sen Gupta calls the "percieved and
potential values",and communicate very efficiently its services and vision.
Each
of these companies has a face we can recognize even in a crowd. It does shows that
they have got their initial branding right. But remember a good face can only
get you an entry. To succeed you got to perform. And, it is not the face only,
which is going to do that.
Nazim Iqbal
| 
