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.