Take your logo beyond a graphic mark to truly embody your brand -By Kevin Masi

The economy is good and business is good. Your company (and most of your clients’ companies) has been growing—some by large measures. If this is true for you, keep reading to discover a potential hidden peril hiding in plain sight.

If you’ve been growing, that means in the last several quarters you've added services, products, capabilities, partnerships and resources. You’ve probably written new marketing materials and expanded your website and BLOG. Your sales reps are undoubtedly presenting new information, success stories and benefits to their prospects.

With all this activity, the meaning of your brand has begun to sprawl. Remember, your brand is the perception of what your business means to its stakeholders—those who expect to benefit from its performance. As your business expands, your brand takes on more meaning for more people. This presents a challenge. It is becoming more difficult for customers to grasp the entirety of what your company can do for them.

Under these conditions, your brand image cannot be held together by a graphic logo mark alone. It needs a brand vision that provides continuity running through the logo to the core purpose of the business, including all its sales and marketing efforts and assets.

To achieve this growth and widening array of product offerings, marketing messages and materials must be summarized into sharp, hard-hitting messages and presentations. This is purely to keep up with your customer, who is moving faster than ever, allowing you only a brief —and shrinking—window of opportunity for your marketing or sales to grab attention and present persuasive value.

That's why repositioning is a core strategic initiative that must be repeated again and again, especially following times of rapid growth. That’s why a positioning must be carried beyond the logo and identity, through all marketing efforts, and into the business operations themselves.

Surveying current marketing initiatives with our own clients, including companies in technology, architecture and food products, I note that they each include such repositioning efforts. By refreshing and updating the brand positioning and brand identity, these companies are re-focusing on their markets. Some are using also the event to re-design logos and identity systems, and re-launching their images. But these projects are representative of changes across their businesses.

A logo mark can only represent a brand if a clear brand promise exists behind it. In companies today, innovation is rapid and continuous, and must be to keep up with changes in business. Therefore, re-branding, re-positioning and re-launch must be conducted periodically to keep pace with this ongoing evolution. If your company has been busy growing, and you haven’t reviewed your positioning lately, these might be things for you to examine and optimize.