Business has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. While a company’s core brand my have remained the same, the way they communicate the brand should evolve to reflect the changing enterprise and the current standards and methods of communication.

Every year, thousands of companies embark on changing their corporate logo. Generally there are two models for updating a corporate mark.

The first is a series of subtle changes. Coca Cola is a prime example of subtle logo evolution. They update their logo frequently and subtly. The average person may not notice each evolution but if you look back over time, the changes become clear.

On the other hand, some firms see the need for a drastic change. Keeping with cola, Pepsi is a good example. Pepsi recently changed the look of each of their brands—departing from the traditional look and adopting a more contemporary appearance.

Which is the better model? It all depends on the organization, its evolution, and its market. Success starts with an accurate representation of the brand through the logo. If the logo is no longer applicable, changing it may strengthen the brand, making the visual and verbal messages cohesive.

Holding on to an outdated logo leads to the following issues;

• An impression that the company doesn’t care—Like architectural styles, fonts and colors reference decades. An audience may not be able to pinpoint a font, but they recognize it looks old. Colors of decades past may eventually come back around but for now are discernibly outdated.
• A perception that the company has not adopted modern business methods—an outdated logo looks like it lives in the past. Unless being old school is the cornerstone of the brand, an old looking logo makes a company look stogy.
• A disconnect between the visual and verbal brands—A company with a logo portraying the early days of the computer industry that offers cutting-edge technology has a huge gap in messaging.
• A lack of importance—Unless an organization has a monopoly, an outdated logo communicates that the company no longer matters in the marketplace. Another player, but certainly not the leader.

Though all elements of a brand—written, verbal, and visual—are equally important when communicating with an audience, the logo is what leaves a lasting impression. Ensuring the logo adheres to the same standards as the rest of the brand—important, tangible, immutable, relevant, and superlative—will help an organization and its brand rise above its competition.

1. Website metrics are free!—there are several quality, open-source software solutions that are able to gather and analyze data as well as benchmark your site against similar sites, giving you invaluable insight with minimal capital outlay.

2. Website metrics are easy to use—the free, open-source software is designed with you in mind. Most website metrics applications are capable of running custom or prepackaged reports that are displayed in visual and easy to use format. Because the software is web-based, you can access your analytics from any computer at any time.

3. Website metrics help you learn about your site’s users—once you know where visitors are going with in your site, you can see why they are going to your site and what’s most important. Web site metrics help put your site’s visitors into perspective; who they are, their geographical location, how they navigated through your site, which pages they paused at and which they skipped, if they purchased anything, and where they exited the site. This invaluable information provides actionable feedback for strategic modifications that will make your site more user friendly.

4. Website metrics will help you drive more traffic to your site—once you have installed metrics on your site and observed the trends of your users, you can start to revise your site to make it more appealing to search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Discovering how people found (or didn’t find) your site is valuable information about keyword strategies you should implement for search engine optimization.

5. Website metrics helps you plan for the future—as you monitor your site with website metrics, patterns will emerge. Use the information about these patterns and trends to help increase the traffic to your site and build your brand. As you plan upcoming marketing initiatives, consider the online community as a viable audience.

Website metrics are a crucial source of information about your web presence and your online audience. One of the best things about the web (and email) is that it provides the platform to collect endless amounts of measurable data that is waiting to be analyzed and put to good use. Make your website work for you and become one of your most valuable marketing resources.

If you take 3 minutes to complete the attached brief survey, we’ll share the results with you. Not to worry, its totally anonymous. This valuable survey will provide insight to perceptions and attitudes as well as an indication of how others are either weathering the storm or thriving in this environment.

We plan this to be the first of a quarterly measurement. Complete this survey along with future ones and you’ll see the trends in business perceptions and attitudes as they develop.

Thanks for completing this short questionnaire. We’ll forward the results in the next couple of weeks.

Client feedback is an important aspect of your brand’s management that is often overlooked. In the past, we relied on our people most in touch with our customers—sales folks, service people, account managers, and installation and maintenance people—to provide information about our audiences. Though insightful, their information was often biased—overlaid with personal interest, the latest customer encounter, and anecdotal judgments.

If you were able to afford a good market research firm, they would interview clients and prospects, investigate the competitors, and uncover the trends of your industry. Traditional market research provides valuable feedback and actionable data, helping you gain insights that are often well worth the dollars spent.

However, obtaining good feedback does not need to be that expensive or time consuming. An online survey is an efficient and cost effective way to reach your audience. The mere action of sending out a survey has an instant positive impact because not only will you be receiving immediate and constructive feedback, your clients will know that you value your relationship by asking for their opinion. Surveying your audience will:

• Provide you with quantifiable data
• Allow you to reach a range of people all at once
• Provide benchmarks for future evaluation
• Gather real-time intelligence

Online surveys provide actionable data—revealing where products are positioned within the mind of the customer, exposing whether campaigns are influencing behavior and in what way, uncovering trends, and even monitoring the level of brand awareness. We even use online surveys to provide a foundation for more productive, in-depth interviews.

Surveys provide the insight and the intelligence needed to spend your marketing dollars effectively. As a cost-effective means of reaching your audience, online surveys give you genuine data that can be used to both evolve your brand and strategic direction while keeping your company top-of-mind—making your organization’s marketing dollars and time better spent.

All too often, organizations spend their time and energy planning and executing communications strategies without acknowledging the needs of their clients, their market’s trends or the efficacy of their efforts.

Technology has not only created more opportunities to communicate with your clients and prospects, it has brought better means to obtain marketing metrics and evaluate the effectiveness of these communications. Armed with this information, organizations can continuously monitor and communicate with their target audiences. This has led to a growing demand for programs that include:

• Marketing Metrics and Accountability. Are your marketing dollars producing the value necessary to meet your goals?
• Customer Understanding and Requirements. Are you aware of evolving customer needs and are you changing to meet them? Do you know why customers buy from you or not?
• Marketplace Knowledge. Have benchmarks and best practices been established within your industry? How does your organization measure up?

The objective of any marketing campaign is to send a message to your target audience and trigger a reaction—such as a thought, an emotion, or a behavior. Each organization must establish marketing metrics based upon its goals. Hospitals may look to patient visits, or levels of giving, educators may look at quantity and quality of student applications and businesses to sales and revenues. Unfortunately, drawing a line from a specific campaign or initiative to results—which often take months to appear—is too simplistic and fails to consider the plethora of other factors.

Clients recognize that research helps them understand their clients and markets, which will allow them to better spend their marketing dollars. While many agencies view research as a time and financial expense, more and more clients are demanding greater accountability for their dollars—and that’s where marketing metrics come into play.

Today, we can almost immediately track the effectiveness of e-mail campaigns, website visits, and other promotions available through the Internet. More intangible forms of communication such as branding strategy and identity, perception, win/loss, satisfaction, and defection can now be monitored much more efficiently—yielding results in shorter periods with greater validity, while being much more cost effective.

While many organizations attempt to collect this information from within, rarely are the results as accurate as they are from the outside. Clients and prospects tend to bias their answers or not respond at all, data is interpreted to meet the needs of the individuals, and often the critical data never makes it to those responsible.

Good data allows organizations to deploy their limited resources more effectively and fosters powerful brands and identities, accurate positioning, and market campaigns yielding better results.

© 2007 ADAMS