UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 20What Really Matters in Branding

In business and marketing, we spend a lot of time, and money, on logos. If you've ever worked on a logo design, you know exactly what I mean. And if it was a rebranding design, then take all that money, time, and effort and double it. Rebranding is really French for “spend ridiculous amounts of money and time you'll never, ever, ever get back.”

We opened UnSelling with a story about the Ritz-Carlton and Joshie. When people think about logos, this is what they think about:

It's so fancy, isn't it? If you've worked on a logo design, you can probably imagine the weeks or months spent on this. There was a right-facing lion camp, a left-facing lion camp, a conservative, tongue-in camp. And there was an entire subcommittee font argument that took place. Some weird guy in the corner talking about Comic Sans…

You know who should design logos? Designers. I've seen people who can't even put an outfit together in the morning giving input on logos. Hire experts, and let them do their jobs.

A logo is meant to do two things. If you don't know the brand, it should give you some idea of what the company is all about. I assume from this one that the Ritz-Carlton is a very fancy, royal lion-like place. If you know the brand, the logo will remind you of the most extreme and the most recent experience you had with them. This is the Ritz-Carlton to me: