Finding cures for logos with Shamefully Transmitted Deterioration. Photo: RhizomeImages.com

Guest post by Jen Pennington, owner and creative director of Rhizome Design, Inc

There’s a lot of talk these days about having a sustainable brand in the marketplace. Experts will talk about branding, and marketing, and customer experiences, and these are all genuinely important aspects in maintaining a successful brand. But there’s always one thing that is rarely mentioned…could it be because it can be unsightly, hidden, and sometimes go undetected? Yes, it’s true. Your logo could have an STD or what I like to call a Shamefully Transmitted Deterioration.

Finding cures for logos with Shamefully Transmitted Deterioration. A brand is more than a logo, but a logo represents that brand at-a-glance. So as a designer, when I see logos that look pixelated or fuzzy, it’s like nails on a chalkboard for me. I feel the need to save it or cure it even if I did not create it.

So where do these diseased logos come from? There are two sources for this strain of the virus. One is directly from within a company. It might be from clueless sales or marketing people who don’t understand how to use their logos or what to hand off, or worse yet, from a CEO who could care less. Logo usage guides may or may not exist, be rarely used, or in some cases they may be too complex to use. I’ve found creating a basic logo usage guide for clients that explains various formats and speaks simply with visuals and callouts, is a much more effective way to keep a brand intact.

The second strain comes from inexperienced designers who hand off only JPGs or rasterized versions to their clients. These are the designers I want to take out in a back alley and…well, never mind. I can understand the client may not be big enough to warrant a logo usage guide, but they still just hand off logos into the ether. In some cases designers go to all the trouble of creating the logo in Illustrator but don’t outline the font. (A major rookie move). This means when it’s opened by another person it’s looking for a font that may not be available. Unusable.

For example, a client of mine does several events every year with major sponsors, and after nine years of working together, I have beaten it into him (in a really nice way) to ask his sponsors for the correct types of logos for my purposes, which are print, web, and signage. I ask for Adobe Illustrator® .EPS files or PDFs I can open Illustrator. This is because vector files are the best files to use when multiple media applications are required. Sometimes for smaller print projects a really high-resolution .JPG or .TIF file will work just fine. But in my case I need those vector images to scale up and not look deteriorated.

Sometimes I get the perfect logos sent to me. It’s a beautiful thing really. Other times, I get the dregs of logo hell sent to me, and worse yet, people send me images from the web. (Yeah this will look good blown up to 2 feet long on a 15 ft. banner. Insert eye roll here). He’ll sheepishly send them over to me and ask, “Can you work your magic?” My magic is the penicillin of many a promiscuous logo—a logo that’s been passed around from multiple sources. It may not cure it completely, but the illusion of a healthy brand will be there when I’m done.

So what’s a respectable logo girl to do? Well the first thing I try is going back to the company and asking again for the right logo or putting me in touch with the art department. This entails tracking down the designer, who speaks my language.

If I can’t do that, the first place I look is www.brandsoftheworld.com. Thank God, that site exists. You just need to make sure you have permissions to use them. In my client’s case he has signed contracts with those sponsors and logo usage is part of the contract.

If a particular brand is not on Brands of the World, then it comes time to use the magic penicillin. I take a logo that’s been poorly JPG’d or some web logo and recreate it in Illustrator. This means finding fonts that are similar or the same, using techniques to pick up colors and shape, redraw what I can with tracing tools, and recreating icons. It feels so completely wrong to touch these logos inappropriately. It makes me feel dirty, I’ve lost time and money on the project, and the logo is now a bastardization of what it once was. But do I feel bad? No. Because I am not the keeper of that company’s brand, and I’m trying my best to work with the sins of others.

It’s a sad thing really. All the time and money that was used to create a once beautiful logo only to be passed around like cheap commodity. So remember people, take good care of your logo, if you want it to be STD free, or prevent unwanted future generations of genetically altered versions milling about.

To view Jen’s amazing work or read more of her musings, visit Rhizome Design.

Seems revenue streams do matter.

I still vividly remember my first dot com client. The CEO was 25, and the director of communications was 23. Not that’s there’s anything wrong with youth and fresh ideas. But every time we went in for a meeting, the business direction had changed and they wanted us to switch gears and promote something different to a new target market. When we asked silly questions like where the revenue stream was going to come from, what their strategy was or to see the marketing plan, we were told we were old school and just didn’t ‘get it’.  That the only thing that mattered was driving eyeballs to the site.  It didn’t matter what the cost of customer acquisition was as long as you had lots of clicks a month to report.

They were going to work hard for a couple of years, take the company public, make a bundle on their stock options and sail off into the sunset. I’m sure you’re shocked to find out that different happen.  And in the end revenues streams not just eyeballs did matter. 

That’s why I was so happy to read Peter Shankman’s post last week:  I Will Never Hire a “Social Media Expert,” and Neither Should You  He likened the current obsession with social media to the dot com era and says. “We’re making the same mistakes that we made during the dotcom era, where everyone thought that just adding the term .com to your corporate logo made you instantly credible. It didn’t. If that’s all you did, you emphasized even more strongly how pathetic your company was.”

His point and I couldn’t agree more, is that social media is the new bright shiny object that everyone’s chasing and now instead of the clarion call being about driving eyeballs to your site it’s about number of followers and engagement.  That “we’re throwing off our clothes and running naked in the rain, waving our hands in the air, sure that this time it’ll be different, because this time it’s better!!”

But none of it’s worth a hill of beans unless you have some strategy behind it and that at the end of the day it drives revenue. Like all good marketing it’s about knowing your customers, where they are, what they want and providing relevant and useful content and promotions.

So don’t keep posting randomly on Facebook or tweeting like a maniac and be pleased with yourself for mastering social media. Think about how it maps to your overall marketing strategy and syncs with your other marketing tactics and then develop a plan of attack.

And please read Peter’s post on the subject.  It’s well worth it.  As is his Seven Ways for Small Biz To Generate Revenue With Social Media RIGHT NOW

The elements of a good press release remain the same: use the inverted pyramid style; write a strong headline and lead paragraph; cover the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why—in the first or second paragraph; avoid jargon, buzz words and hype.  See my earlier post about taking  a buzz saw to the buzz words. Oh yeah, and make sure you actually have something newsworthy to announce!

But what’s new is that you need to think about optimizing your releases for search engines. What does this mean? Make sure your releases are full of keyword-rich copy. Think carefully about what the pertinent keywords should be; the ones that would be commonly used by your customers to search for your product or service, not just the ones your industry uses to talk about itself. Need help figuring them out? Use Google AdWords for ideas. Try to use the keywords in your headline and in the first 50 words of the release.

Other tips:

• Integrate anchor text hyperlinks within the body copy of the press release.
• Post the press release to a news area on your site. This will create an additional page the search engines can crawl, index and perhaps show in search engine results.
• Watch the length of your release. Some news search engines will not recognize a press release that is longer than 1,000 words or less than 200 words. Additionally, the longer your press release, the less keyword density it will have.

However, above all make sure your release reads well. Just like writing web copy it’s always a balancing act between pleasing the search engine Gods and pleasing your audience. Don’t stuff your copy with keywords to the point where you turn off your readers and customers.

For more tips check out the great resources that PRWeb offers.

I’ve been pitching the media for years. I know what makes a good story and a good pitch, I know that it’s my job to facilitate things and get them useful information in a timely fashion.  I admit it was a little weird to have the shoe on the other foot and to wander around Safeco Field wearing a media badge. But illuminating. When you’re on deadline and writing your story and searching for content, you view press releases and the people who sent them in a whole new way. I don’t know that I’d do anything differently but it has heightened my awareness of my customers’ needs.  Being on the other side of the fence has been good for me.

Other great things to do from time to time include taking a hard look at your website from your customers’ perspective.  What would you want to know if you were them?  Are you answering all their questions?  Using words they’d use, not industry jargon?  Create a list of 10 terms you think customers would use when searching for your product or service. Then review your website copy and see if they’re there.

So go ahead, try on some new shoes.  It will do you good.

Chainsaw Jen hates buzzwords as much as I do

I am forever telling clients that there are many words that are so overused as to be meaningless. Being a ‘leading solutions provider,’ ‘innovative leader’ or ‘award winning’ does not differentiate you nor add anything to your PR or marketing copy. In fact it can diminish your credibility. It certainly makes my eyes glaze over.

That’s why I love this article from Ragan’s PR Daily which reports on PR strategist Adam Sherk’s analysis of the top 25 most overused buzzwords in PR and marketing.

The most common word (used 776 times in press releases in a 24 hour period) is ‘leading’ followed by ‘solution’ (622 times).  Innovate / innovative / innovator was #4 on the list.

So please peoples, take a buzz saw to the buzz words and find more creative ways to express yourselves.

OK, first things first.  Full disclosure.  I had Vegemite for breakfast this morning.  And when friends from Australia come over to visit and ask what they can bring me, the answer is always Vegemite.  So there’s still some Aussie in me despite having no accent what so all anymore and living in the US for longer than I care to admit to.  And as someone born and raised in Australia I’ve always been annoyed by The Outback Steakhouse shtick.  There’s no Bloomin’ Onions in Australia.  And some of the other menu names are truly cringe-worthy.

Eat at Outback and the troups benefit.  This connects to their brand how?

But I can get past that. I get it, it’s a theme restaurant.  With these things come caricatures and schmaltz. But as a brand strategist, rather than offended Aussie, I don’t get their campaign: Thanks For Giving.  If you order off their Red, White, and Bloomin’ menu before April 5th, they’ll donate money to Operation Homefront, a non- profit providing assistance to US service members and wounded warriors.  They’re promoting it everywhere. You can share your hero story and they will feature it on their website and Facebook page.  When I first saw the ad on TV my reaction was, huh?  It was a complete disconnect for me. Please don’t misunderstand, it’s admirable and commendable to want to support US service men and women, but it’s a confusing brand strategy.

Strong brand = focus + consistency,  including where and how you give 

We all know that a strong brand is one where every touch point with its customer is consistent.  The company knows what it stands for and can communicate it everywhere you come into contact with it. Every aspect of the company should relate to the brand, including where and how you give and to whom you give.

Half Price Books and REI: these giving strategies map to their brands

Half Price Books feels that every child deserves a book of their own so hosts book drives to benefit children who might not otherwise have access to books.

Driving home last night I heard an ad on the radio for Half Price Books promoting their Half Pint Library program, a book drive hosted each year to collect and distribute children’s books to those in need.  That made total sense and made me smile. 

REI has a strong committment to environmental stewardship

REI is another great example.  On their website they spell it out: “REI’s passion for the outdoors runs deep. Our core purpose is to inspire, educate and outfit people for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship.”    So they in invest in outdoor recreation programs and stewardship projects,  and dedicate a portion of their operating profits to help protect and restore the environment, increase access to outdoor activities, and encourage involvement in responsible outdoor recreation.  Now that’s on brand giving.  And something that resonates with their customers.

Yes, Outback is a US-based chain so I’m not suggesting they should be giving to Australian charities in order to be on brand.  But perhaps something more closely related to food – feeding the hungry or scholarships for returning veterans to culinary arts or hospitality management programs –would be better.

There are many who will disagree with me as it’s hard to find fault with a company that’s doing something as patriotic as supporting our troups.  And maybe as one of my friends suggested, the demographic that eats at Outbacks will really respond to the initiative.  And what’s not to like about giving money to such a great cause?

Confused, noble or somewhere in between?

What do you think? Is the Thanks for Giving campaign a noble patriotic effort so doesn’t matter that it’s not tied directly to the brand?  Or do you get the connection to the brand where this cranky Aussie doesn’t?   Watch the video and let me know.

For those of you who are foodies and want more details about the Seattle Top Chef tryouts, here’s the guest blog post on Table Talk Radio:

Will Seattle Chefs Be Packing Their Knives For Top Chef?

Today I attended the Top Chef tryouts and had a great time chatting with some of the chefs who were auditioning for Season 9 of Bravo TV’s hot reality show. I’ll be guest blogging about it for Table Talk Radio and will post a link when it’s up.

Even though a lot of the chefs described some delicious and mouth-watering dishes, the descriptions of seared tuna dishes are all a bit of a blur. (Tuna was a popular choice for the culinary interpretation of the color blue.) It was a great reminder about the need to create ways to stand out from the crowd.

Bravo is conducting auditions in 9 cities across the country. Clearly, it’s a given that there will be many extremely talented chefs applying. So I was surprised that when I asked ‘what makes you stand out’ that many of them answered in what I would call ‘ante-in’ terms: ‘I’m passionate about culinary arts’ or ‘I have great cooking skills’ or ‘I’m creative.’ Really? That might be what gets your foot in the door but it’s not what will make you stand out.

My guess is that when the casting director sits down to review all the applicants, she’ll remember the chef who included a clip of his break dancing routine in his audition tape or the one whose culinary interpretation of Five Gold Rings (from the song Twelve Days of Christmas) talked about how his antipasto plate was designed to evoke the spirit of Christmas and the warm feeling of singing Christmas carols around the table with his family. Or the chef whose interpretation of the color blue was a Cookie Monster cake in honor of his new niece.

Image copyright Robert J. Pennington

The same is true for businesses. No matter what you’re selling, you have competitors with products or services that also have similar features and benefits. That’s a given just like it was a given that talented chefs would turn up to today’s casting call. It’s not enough to sell on that alone. Too often when helpinbg companies with their brand strategy I’ll ask managememt and employees what sets them apart and the answers are so overused or generic to be meaningless. “We’re known for our quality.” “We value our customers.” Or the hospital executive who once told me their differentiator was the quality of their surgeons. To which a consumer replied, ‘well I wouldn’t even consider going there in the first place if I didn’t think they had good doctors.’

So today was a great branding 101 reminder. What makes for a strong brand is a clearly defined brand promise and a distinct brand personality. Add to that some great brand stories, not just a list of bells and whistles. We’ll remember (and tell others) the stories long after we’ve forgotten the other details. Just as I can remember the face of the chef who told me about his 3 year old daughter, but not the one who talked about using nothing but the freshest ingredients, sourced locally.

Needless to say, I’ll be eagerly awaiting Season 10 of Top Chef to see if any of the chefs I spoke to today made the cut!

P.S. Gorgeous fig photo courtesy Rhizome Images, a boutique stock photography site.

And the moral of the story? Always test your presentation on multiple machines to make sure the formatting hasn’t gone awry.

Some Fonts Can Make Your PowerPoint Suck