Multiplication Tables: How Many Logos Do You Need?

Assessing your logo system needs starts with marketing needs.

Long-ago history says you only need one really well designed logo. From there, you can change the colors around a bit, add a tagline, a few basic edits to a single piece of art. Easy to manage, easy to apply. More recent history blows up this ideal due to a wider variety of media available. New use cases, new spatial concerns and a host of dual technical requirements /freedoms multiplies the need. Print collateral, television or video, banner ads, sponsorships, out of home advertising, websites, locational signage, social media and a host of easily produced promotional items have inflicted new specs and new opportunities for frequent logo visibility.

Also a part of recent history is that increase in pace across all aspects of life. What used to take months to meander its way through the public psyche now drives itself into the minds of those most plugged-in over the course of mere minutes, then ripples out from there. As such, we’ve become attuned to novelty, placing less value on consistency and more on cleverness. It’s a savvy world, that in many ways, demands more.

You can categorize these timely developments into sets, as follows:

1- The Basic: Your main logo, plus a reversed version (for use on backgrounds other than white) along with color variations and perhaps an icon component of the logo that you can pull off for use when space is really tight, or when you don’t want to repeat your company name three times in close proximity.

2- New Demands: Expanding some variety to the set we move to needing a horizontal version, a stacked/vertical version and a version that fits legibly in a square for basic social media use and some promotional items.

3- Super New Demands: Here’s where a whole lot more consideration is given by adding an ultra-simplified mark—which assumes your brand is so recognizable that a color or shape identifies it—and an animated logo is created for video/screen use. With the ease and availability of online video advertising, video production and an abundance of giant high resolution tv screens around, an animated logo—with a sonic branding cue—is no longer the domain of mega-corps.

4- Extra Credit: Taking our nods from merch-minded sports teams, breweries, universities, and the hot rod scene, being entirely irreverent with alternate marks, hyper-stylized type/script options and color combos completely unrelated to the core brand means the rule book demanding consistency is officially set on fire and thrown out the window. There’s a whole lot of room for improvisation, pop-culture references, cause marketing, holiday dress up and grabbing the attention of specific interest groups with this approach.

There isn’t a prescriptive answer to the “how many?” question, but thinking through your marketing needs can help determine where to invest in breadth, and give you a sense of where you stand on the brand recognition continuum in order to do so. 

Which brings us to an important point: the reason this variety of logo marks works, why absolute visual conformity and consistency can be selectively ignored, is that a brand is much more than a logo. A brand is the entirety of perception formed about a company or product in the consumer’s mind. Alterations, shifts, adaptations, updates and evolution widen the brand appeal to be picked up by an ever widening audience.

Which leads us to the big, important questions:

When was the last time you evaluated your stock of logo options? Is your brand identity showing digital resilience with the right formatting to fit social media and the flexibility to reorient? Would a refresh, a reconfigure or an alternate open up new possibilities? Do you have new offerings, locations, divisions that could be boosted with an expanded range of logo marks?