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A logo is a combination of graphics and text used to symbolize a business and a brand. The ideal logo will reveal to consumers what brand stands for, offer an idea as to what the company is about, and even hint and the people behind it and what they stand for. You’ll know a logo is successful if you notice the targeted demographic is responding to the brand, demonstrating the simple design concept is serving its purpose as a marketing tool.
Should Logos Have Taglines? The short answer is not always. A good logo design will accomplish what a brand sets out to achieve on the various mediums such as business cards and letterheads on its own. A tagline, regardless of length, can potentially diminish the impact of the logo and make brand recognition as well as recall challenging for the audience when added to the concept.
The only reason a business should use a tagline in creating the logo is if it somehow speaks additional critical information to the demographic concerning the brand and the company. Otherwise, the logo alone needs to have the primary spotlight.
Logo Design With A Tagline Attached
A tagline seen as redundant to your target audience or that provides the demographic with nothing useful concerning the brand can potentially prove harmful with its impact and how the company is viewed.
For all intents and purposes, if you don’t have a powerful line, don’t include it in the concept until you’re able to develop a strong alternative. You’ll know when it’s right.
The perfect one will be catchy, brief and simple, but descriptive. It should bring instant recall for consumers. There are a multitude of brands with popular logos offering impactful taglines, ensuring a memorable response if you genuinely think about it. This is where you want your brand to be.
Understanding The Tagline Concept
A tagline, also called a ‘slogan,’ speaks critical facts about a brand or products and services by way of a phrase that catches consumers’ attention. These don’t need to be specific to what you represent as a company but would instead spark a particular feeling associating it with the brand. An often-used example is Nike’s “Just Do It” – very simple, short, draws attention, and is powerful with its audience.
Logos are fantastic in identifying a company to the public. But they don’t translate to radio ads or offer as much impact in television commercials and even digital ads without the addition of an audible tagline radiating with those engaging.
But a weak slogan will do the opposite and can detract from not only the logo but the brand and the feeling it denotes. If the slogan is not offering a consumer insight into the company or what it offers, there is no need for it. The idea overall is to not only draw in the targeted audience but to stand out from competitors in the industry.
- Differentiating factors. Though you may be in a similar business as the next person, each company takes a unique approach with their particular products and services. In saying that, a slogan or tagline needs to distinguish this. It’s vital in the design phase of your logo to take appropriate time and effort in considering what sets you apart.
The differences between you and your counterparts are elements to implement in catchphrases for taglines. And that’s how the infamous and memorable slogans came to be.
- Intrigue. As with anything in business, you don’t want to show all your cards in just this one line. A bit of mystery, as opposed to a message divulging all of your secrets, is going to interest your customer, enticing them to come to see for themselves. The only requirement is that the intended emotion comes across in a short message that leaves a little to the imagination.
- Brief and powerful. Text that is too long, over three or four words, will cause the logo and brand to be lost and decrease customer recall. These mean to grab attention instantly using some kind of hook in the form of humor potentially, which can’t happen if it requires the customer time to take it in.
The most powerful, memorable taglines in existence today comprise only three words that everyone in the entire world knows. And this is what a brand’s goal should be. Ironically, these slogans, “I’m Lovin’ It” and “Just Do It” don’t honestly say anything to the customer about the business at all. But you do instantly feel something when you hear the line.
Less Is More
When you create a logo design attaching a slogan with only three words, there is a natural balance between the two, whereas a long line will take away from what should be the primary focus.
If you feel that more words need to be incorporated, this may be something that you should use in another aspect of your marketing concept as opposed to setting up a potential issue with the logo.
Don’t Waste the Concepts You Didn’t Use
These would be beneficial in places where the consumer may spend more time engaging like within the company voicemail, on the storefront window, applied on business clothing, within digital advertising, marketing flyers or business cards, and perhaps the website.
In most of these cases, the tagline will likely have a more significant effect by itself instead of being designed into the logo creation.
The takeaway when you’re considering the notion of a tagline attached to your logo is to incorporate careful thought and sufficient time in finding an impactful phrase to emphasize the logo and bring an adequate sense of emotion to your brand.
If the idea you develop doesn’t succeed in doing this but is ideal for your marketing needs, it should not be used in combination with your logo. Instead, it needs to be incorporated into other marketing collateral.
The Importance Of The Logo For A Brand’s Image
It’s critical to research whether a tagline is beneficial in combination with a logo for a business or whether the logo should remain separate because the logo is a primary component contributing to the image of a brand.
The logo design will ultimately serve as unique recognition for the consumer of a business and its brand. This is the element that shows a company’s specialty in an industry where there may be considerable competition. It appears to be a tiny element of an overall strategy, but it is, in fact, a giant component for which everyone will come to know and define your specific brand.
Creating the symbol representing the products and services produced by your business should not be taken lightly. It’s crucial that it be effective in promoting the vision you have for what you manufacture and that those seeing it receive the message you’re relaying to them.
You don’t want it to be an ‘inside joke’ for just a specific in-crowd – it needs to be a universal concept to draw in consumers who you may not have anticipated. You’ll know the design is okay if you say the company name and the symbol are immediately recognized. This is a sign that the logo is a genuine representation of who you are and what your goals are.
The concept for good design translates to logos that are done poorly as well. A bad logo is memorable to the public and associates itself with the business steering people away from engaging with that company.
Good or bad, these symbols serve as the most often viewed and displayed ‘advertisement’ for products and services, meaning the impact that it has is significant. If that impact is negative, the business will indeed suffer those consequences because each time the consumer views that symbol, they will likely pass it up.
Logo Types
There are a variety of ways that a company can design a logo. The ideal logo should be simplistic so that the consumer has the capability of identifying it instantly.
The process of choosing the design can prove daunting, with some business owners seeing it as a challenge in conjunction with everyday company operations. It will take considerable time and attention to create an adequate symbol to represent your products and services and one that will speak for the business as to what it stands for and who you are as the owner.
This one component of your business will have a booming voice. And you need to be a part of the development process even if you decide to outsource the creation.
- The use of text to comprise the logo relies on ‘font’ to bring power to the design concept. With these, the business name and a tagline are incorporated in simple font styling. These type symbols are typical if you want the company name to be a prominent element, such as with Microsoft or Google.
- If you opt for a symbol to represent the values of your company, it needs to be a symbol that consumers can readily associate with your business along with those values and the items that you produce. Just using a symbol is tricky if your preferred audience doesn’t recognize it or understand the association.
Prominent logo examples include Adidas and Nike. But in all reality, in just using a symbol and nothing more, considering Nike, in the initiation of this logo and the startup process of this business, how many people saw this logo and knew it was for a sports shoe immediately?
Yes, now it is absolutely the icon of Nike, speaks volumes by itself, and is a design inspiration as far as logos. But initially, there was more marketing work required alongside the logo to make this symbol gain traction. Nike needed marketing and advertising for the logo in order for the logo to work as a valuable marketing tool to represent the brand effectively. Right?
- This leads us to our next type, which deems to likely be the most advantageous of the three because it gives the preferred demographic a lot of information in a simplistic format using both an image and text.
You can see these examples with several popular designs, such as Dropbox. With a logo of this sort, you can implement a company name with a symbol denoting what that business represents, who they are, what they stand for, making it a strong statement for the brand.
The type that you choose will determine the message you send to your customers. Each has the potential for equal impact, depending on the quality of your design. With text, a tagline will bring attention. For those who choose a simple symbol design, most likely, there will be a need for other marketing and advertising to bring insight into the meaning behind the symbol. And with the combination type, it’s all-inclusive.
Initiating The Design Process
Once you decide on the type that you want to employ for your logo, ensure while strategizing the design concept key elements consumers can take away that will stick with them for future recall and recognition in association with what you’re selling with clarity and simplicity.
The idea is to think outside the box as if you’re in an original and unique sector even though you have similar products as your competition. But do so in a universal, functional language for the public at large and not just your preferred demographic. You never want to limit yourself strictly to a target audience when you have the potential to branch out to people you may not have considered. Use your marketing tools to target your audience while reaching out and speaking to everyone.
Logo design has the potential for going wrong, which can be detrimental for the company and, more importantly, the brand. Once the public associates a symbol with products and services in a negative light, that brand will have the perception as an inferior product. And in most instances, it’s not something that can repair quickly once the association is established.
Do Your Research – and Be Patient
You want to take special care when researching your logotype creation. It’s not anything that should be rushed or chosen impulsively. Don’t presume, though, just because you don’t have the instant success you hope for; it means the symbol is not well-received. Patience is key, and it takes time for the demographic as a whole to make the identification and run with it.
The market is full of companies that engage in the same types of goods and services. That doesn’t mean the individual companies need to follow each other’s marketing leads, pathways, or design their business materials in the same likeness. It’s critical to a company’s success in standing out apart from all competition rather than follow in their footsteps. In doing so, you need to find your niche or specialty in the field and highlight it in your logo and tagline.
The symbol represents your opportunity to showcase the uniqueness that your business offers within the field. It represents the reasons consumers choose to follow your brand as opposed to all the others on the market. It may seem like using such a small marketing component to voice your strengths, deeming you the standout is impossible, but it’s a matter of betraying the norm.
There are a plethora of favorites loved by the public who took this stance and enjoyed the success of having done so. It’s not a matter of using lengthy-expression or a ton of special effects to make your point, quite the opposite. It’s a more in-your-face blunt, bold punch that those who view it can’t shake.
If you’re a DIY kind of person, you can use a logo design maker like Placeit to create your logo from templates.
Finding Help With The Design Process
There’s no room in advertising for annoying clichés or plays on words. That’s all been done to death, and the typical customer is too smart for that ploy today. In saying that, frequently, it takes a professional designer to evoke creativity. Sometimes, an expert can take a concept and shape it into the perfect representation for which you would have never been able to imagine.
A good design team has the capability of understanding when a tagline would work better as a standalone tool or if it’s impactful in combination with the logo. They can also take your idea and expand on it so that the symbol represents the brand in a unique, individualistic way or let you know that what you’ve come up with is much too complicated but help you in an attempt to notch it down for better execution.
The Benefits of Expert Help
It’s not always easy for a business to outsource any scope of business or marketing, but there are instances where the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks. In getting opinions from a third party not involved in everyday production, you have the benefit of their having a unique perspective meaning their contribution to your design will be different from any other business in the industry.
And as we’ve been saying all along, the idea in a competitive industry is standing out in the crowd. The best way to do that is to implement advice and assistance from a design team in conjunction with the natural, unusual spin that your company provides as compared to the competitors for the people who make up the preferred demographic. The result coming from this decision is an optimal logo and overall business success. Win-Win.
