Recently, a colleague was discussing with me about his branding thoughts as they related to online marketing. Laughing, he admitted that he had obsessed over the placement of his logo on his website. Should it go in the top left? Top right? Middle? Off center? He said he spent quite some time on it before he sat up, blinked, and realized that his logo was just a minor element in a much larger effort. He said he was reminded of a couple lessons that day:

1. A brand is more than a logo. A brand is everything about you.
2. Many people don’t have logos and still do quite well. Because they have a brand.
3. If people spent as much time and money on other parts of their brand as they do on their logo, we’d double or triple the amount of successful business owners in the world.

So it was funny to me, after talking to him, that I stumbled across this exact topic by Beth Goldstein, President of the Boston-based Marketing Edge Consulting Group. Her tip, which appears in Business Week, is called “Branding Does Not Require a Logo”. (Read her entire tip at: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/tips/archives/2009/09/branding_does_n.html).

How true this is! A logo is not necessary. That is to say, a logo can help but it is not the be-all and end-all of branding, even though many brand new entrepreneurs can spend more on their logo than they do on other aspects of their business.

I asked a number of business owners in my sphere of contacts to tell me where a logo fell for them on the list of things they’d invest in if they ever had to start over again. All of them listed plenty of branding-related efforts in the top ten but not a single one listed “logo”. A few of them said that they’d still add a logo, but it wasn’t as high up on their list. Several of them sheepishly admitted that the list looked a lot different (and included a logo) during their very first business.

Folks, you do not need a logo. But here I am, harshing on logos when the logo is just a symptom of a much larger problem: Brand new small businesses need to position themselves but their logo only plays a tiny, tiny part. The biggest brands in the world have logos that are recognizable apart from the words: We’d all recognize Nike’s Swoosh, Coca-Cola’s curvy line, and Chevrolet’s logo, which I’m told is often called a “bowtie”. But a lot has gone into building these brands as a whole and a lot of investment has been made into making the logo a part of the branding.

But small businesses don’t have that kind of investment to make (yet). So if they have a marketing dollar to spend, it shouldn’t be spent on trying to embed a visual logo into the mind of their client. Save that for the big business. Instead, small businesses should be spending their marketing dollar on positioning efforts that position value and help build trust. This probably means more information-heavy positioning work (think: blogs and articles rather than logos) because those will do a better job of establishing that much-needed credibility with the potential customer.

photo credit: derekGavey