Some marketers have a militant reputation for policing their company’s logos and graphic marks. They safeguard and hide original logo files as if protecting a confidential information source.

Invariably, there are leaks. It could be a clever salesperson copying the logo from your Web site and throwing it into a presentation or proposal, but first applying their own creative and graphic sensibility to add a threatening shadow in the background or stretching and distorting the logo’s dimensions and scale.

You can understand why a marketer might get upset: violations of logo and graphic standards dilute the strength of a brand and can confuse the market and customers. Could you imagine the IBM logo with vertical instead of horizontal stripes? Big Blue would gag.

Of course it’s the responsibility of marketing to develop usage guidelines for logos and make sure that anyone who might be using the logo (that would be everyone) knows and adheres to the guidelines.

Here’s an interesting case: One company recently developed a new logo for its flagship product, called ProAlign®. The software helps businesses with many sales territories create balanced, fair territories that provide equal opportunity for each salesperson and help to reduce travel time and other sales-related costs.

It was a good time to create a new logo and visual identity because the company was launching a new online version of its product to complement a desktop version. The new logo looked like this:

Part of the branding concept is that the software this company sells is called ProAlign, and it can be deployed on the desktop, over the Web or in some combination, depending on a customer’s needs. ProAlign is the umbrella name for the product and its deployment options.

Right away a problem surfaced. Some un-named person developed a presentation only on the web deployment of ProAlign, and that un-named person did this on the title slide of his/her presentation:

That’s not the ProAlign logo, or a variation of it. The marketer who caught this immediately dashed off an email with usage guidelines, which would soon become integrated into a complete usage manual (this manual should have been developed when the logo was created, but this company runs with things sometimes a little too quickly). Here are a few of the guidelines:

1) We have and should use only one ProAlign logo, which refers to “ProAlign Software” or the “ProAlign product family” or the “ProAlign portfolio of software products.” Notice the word “Software” is capitalized as a key descriptor when writing text. This provides more impact.

2) In no case should we use the ProAlign logo with the word “Software”, “Desktop” or “Web” after it. Those words are simply product descriptors and not part of the logo. The logo should stand alone and should have enough white space around it to avoid any confusion.

3) In writing proposals, presentations, Web copy, collateral, etc., refer to “ProAlign Web” or “ProAlign Desktop” to indicate specific deployment versions. Or to discuss ProAlign generally, write “ProAlign” or “ProAlign Software.” In each case capitalize the descriptor for greater impact, or leave it off when discussing the entire product family. The first time ProAlign appears in the headline or text, use the registered R trademark (®) after it. Subsequent appearances in the same body of work do not need the trademark. 

Takeaway: creating a logo isn’t just making a pretty graphic mark, it’s part of a thoughtful, disciplined branding process.

Dear Dave:

My company is significantly cutting our marketing budget for 2009, but I’m still expected to deliver results. What should I do?

Signed

Desperately seeking marketing budget

Dear Desperate:

Welcome to the “do more with less club.” A recent survey of Chief Marketing Officers by marketing services company Epsilon revealed that marketing is usually among the first casualties in a downturn, despite the widespread belief among marketing executives that a tough economic period is precisely the time when marketing must play a key role.

All you can do is rise to the challenge. Here are two strategies:

1. Understand what your executive team expects your company’s marketing investments to deliver. Together, you should define clear objectives and establish metrics to measure marketing performance. Use past performance to get an idea of what your new budget can realistically expect to deliver in terms of brand exposure and lead generation.
2. Diversify your marketing plan by including programs that can be measured. More and more, marketers are turning to online and interactive marketing programs because (1) virtually all of their customers and prospects search online for products and solutions, and (2) online programs are built around performance metrics: views, clicks, conversions. Seek out appropriate industry Web sites, newsletters and search engines where you can build a presence. And don’t forget to strengthen the content on your own Web site and ramp up email marketing efforts to your house list.

Despite economic and market conditions, marketers who act with intelligence and resolve will withstand the downturn and emerge stronger on the other side.

For David Klein Marketing, I’m Dave

Mad Men is AMC’s brilliant television series that revolves around the world of advertising executives in the early 1960s. It is rich with atmosphere, full of compelling story lines, stocked with complex characters who behave badly and sometimes admirably.

The main character is Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm), the thirtysomething executive who heads up the creative department for the firm of Sterling Cooper. In the season finale, when the firm is acquired by another, Don is told that “good creative is important, but it can’t run the show.” Don fires back that he “sells products, not advertising.” When I heard that comeback, I started my fist pumping.

It’s true in advertising and marketing that good creative doesn’t run the show. Good creative is the show. 

Creative carries your message to the market. It’s how your customers and prospects first experience your company. This applies in all cases: from a six-word search engine keyword ad to a home page, from a highway billboard to a 30-second radio spot, from a print ad to a business card.

Thank you Don Draper. His comment also got me thinking about Klein Marketing. I don’t sell marketing services. I sell clear positioning that makes you stand out from the noise of competitors; focused, relevant messages that are noticed, understood and remembered by your target audience; positive results on lead generation, long term branding, and corporate communications programs; and expert strategy marketing strategy, budget development, and program management.

In Part One of this series, I discussed the first marketing steps a new company should undertake: naming and positioning. In Part Two, we move on to every creative person’s favorite – logo development, which is the visual foundation of your branding strategy.

Here’s the assignment: Create a logo and visual identity that reflects the essence of your company’s market position, customer value, current environment, and future vision. Translating these complex attributes into graphics does not come easily. It requires a combination of conceptual, usability, graphic design, and marketing skills. Key message: seek professional help. Or not.

Some companies take the easy way out and settle on a variation of the ubiquitous swirl or swoosh, or the up-and-coming “waves” theme, and say that the logo represents energy and motion and momentum.

Other companies take another low-cost, low-value route using one of the many online services, such as VistaPrint, that offers step-by-step logo creation. Nothing against VistaPrint, which I’ve used to print business and greeting cards, but settling for clip art logos is like choosing a paint-by-numbers piece over a Picasso to hang on your wall. However, using this approach is viable if you happen to associate the words cheap, amateurish, and short-lived with your brand.

What’s a better approach to logo development? Work with an experienced marketing professional and logo designer who follows a carefully scripted process. This dramatically increases the likelihood you will end up with a logo that:

• Reflects the key attributes of your company and evokes the appropriate emotional responses in your customers and others who view your logo
• Is unique, memorable and describable 
• Works in black and white as well as color because it will appear both ways
• Can scale to large and small sizes and still be legible
• Can be used in all applications, from your Web site to print materials to promotional items and more
• Is delivered to you in all required file formats with colors properly specified for all print and online uses, along with usage guidelines to help protect your brand
• Serves as an effective foundation for business cards, letterhead and all other branded materials

 Here’s a link to document showing a new logo and usage manual created for a client.

I’m always talking to my clients about the need to create more marketing content. But what exactly is content? Information, yes, but more than that: it is water for customers and prospects who thirst for knowledge, it is sustenance to fuel the marathon process known as the sales cycle.

Content consists of web pages, white papers, articles, brochures, presentations, podcasts and other packaged, educational information that helps generate interest in your products and position your company as experts. And it helps keep that interest going and growing when you need to nurture leads over the long run.

I recently underwent a “content inventory” project with a client. Sales people were claiming that they lacked the right information to help support their sales process and move prospects along toward becoming customers. So we dug up all the content the company currently had: hard copies from the literature racks, PDFs on the server, custom one-off pieces on someone’s hard drive. Postcards, letters, Flash demonstrations . . .

We found an amazing amount of useful material. The problem was that it wasn’t categorized or easily accessible. So we set about creating a central repository of content categorized by type, created short summaries of each piece, suggested when and where each piece should be used, and made it accessible to everyone who needed it.

In undergoing this exercise, we also uncovered unmet needs for specific types of content: a white paper on this subject, a data sheet on that product. Then we established a team of consisting of content creators (marketing and other subject matter experts) and content consumers (sales people and their customers and prospects) that would meet regularly to discuss new content needs and manage projects to make sure those needs are met.

Remember: your customers and prospects are hungry for information that will help them solve the challenges they face every day in performing their jobs. It’s your job to feed them.