Self justification of costings for logos...

Si and I were walking back from the car today, after a ‘break’ talking about Logo Design.

It can be hard justifying the cost of some parts of what our company does sometimes. We talk about it a lot – I think in an effort to comfort each other over the guilt. A lot of our work, put in the simplest terms, consists of simply making things look better, and having fun while we do so. It’s hard to sometimes say “Well the thing with logos is that many of your customers may not even give it a second thought. It won’t have a direct and discreetly measurable affect on your business. In the chaotic nature of the world you could spent £400,000 and it could still have the adverse affect (like the Olympics logo – though it’s not directly measurable so we’ll never know). And yeah, you could get it done badly for £150. It’ll do the same thing, but, well, er, badly.

But our advice is to spend £10,000 with us and we’ll do it really well. Nah really mate…it’s a bargain. Just not a quantifiable one.”

Most design agencies that charge a lot of money for this kind of work will obviously say it makes a massive difference – that you can’t succeed with a bad logo, and that you need to communicate everything about your business in the first 0.3 seconds. But most of them also need to defend the huge amounts of money they get paid, for essentially doing something that, if done properly, is a massively creative and enjoyable.

So some days I’m not so sure if it’s a waste of money - or at least some days I can feel that it's hard to justify the large sums of money for that part of what we do. Other days I’m damn sure it’s the opposite, and the best values work we do. The way you present yourself affects so many things and can have benefits that you might not think about. Which brings me back round to the point (I knew I’d get there eventually…) One of Si’s points when we were talking is that he’s seen one of the logos he’s designed significantly change a company over the last year or so - not so much because of how it’s affected their clients, more how its affected the company’s owners and staff. (Though I'm assured it's gone done very well with clients as well.)

The logo and branding for that company is now everywhere – it surrounds the staff and is their stamp on the work they do, and it really does look great. And Si’s seen the company a lot over the past year, working with and for them, and he believes that it’s changed the attitude of the people who work there. That it’s given them a little more belief and changed how they perceive their own company, and that has undoubtedly help lead them to great results – more sales, growth, and an advancement of their ability to do a their jobs.

You can’t say for sure if the company would have done that without the new logo and branding. And you can’t say for sure if it made £10,000 worth of difference – though anyone who runs a business of any size knows how little money that really is in business terms. But the thing is they didn’t pay £10k, they paid a little over a tenth of that – and I’m positive that’s a gamble worth taking (admittedly they got an outstanding price due to the fact they’re business partners of ours - they should have paid a lot more).

I guess what I’m really saying is I can justify people giving us large amounts of money so we can carry on doing our massively creative and enjoyable jobs. At least to myself… :)