Guest post by Ben Johnson

Have you created a logo design for your business? If not, then you have got to get one. Why? Well, because your logo design gives your business a face. If you create a good looking logo, then your business will look really good. If you create a low quality design, then you will mess up the image of your company. So, it’s your logo design that can either mess up your business image completely or give it a dazzling identity.

To give a good-looking face to your business, you need to create an attractive logo. Once you create a dazzling identity, you will be able to win the trust of your market. How? Remember, your market won’t be able to meet you personally or see you physically – They will only see your logo and try to determine how reliable you are.

So, if your business has a pretty face (logo), you will create a pretty good impression.

Now…To give your business a dazzling identity with a top quality logo design, there are several elements you need to take into consideration to make it a success. Let’s discuss them:

Make Sure the Color Scheme is Relevant to Your Business

What does it mean? Your logo represents your business, so it must have the right colors to represent your business properly. For example, if you are creating a logo for a hospital, then its color scheme will be light and sober as compared to the color scheme of the logo of an entertainment company. So, you need to keep in view your business and audience before you finalize the color scheme.

Make Sure Your Logo Clearly Depicts the Mood of Your Business

Just like color schemes, this is also a very important element of your business logo. If you are designing a logo for charity, then you must consider the mood of such organizations and contributors. It will be wrong to have a clown in such a logo. So, you need to do some research and analyze your competitors first and then determine the layout of your logo design.

Make Sure it’s Simple and Memorable

Do you think that a complicated logo will make you look more professional? This is a totally wrong perception. Complexity has nothing to do with being professional. Simplicity always rocks and simple logos are always memorable. Do you think that Nike, Toyota, Honda and Target logos are complicated? No, they are not. They are simple and attractive logos and you need something similar too.

Make Sure Your Logo is Visually Appealing

Just as flowers attract bees, your logo should attract your target market. If it doesn’t look good, will anyone take notice of it? No, everyone will ignore it. So, to grab the attention of your market, you must work hard to create a visually appealing logo.

The bottom line is that you have got to seriously consider the elements mentioned above to create an attractive and top quality logo design and give your business a dazzling identity.

About the author

Ben Johnson is the Alliance Manager at Logoinn, a custom logo design company. He writes about the effect of design on marketing and brand identity and helps small businesses find design solutions for effective marketing.

I have always been intrigued by the relationship Romanians have had with their car brand, Dacia. It is the only brand that still exists and that did not disappear after the Revolution that put an end to communism. But the way we’ve seen the brand, the way we’ve related to it or chosen to ignore it, makes for a very interesting story.

Dacias were not the best of cars during the communist period.  But they were one of the few types of cars you could actually get. Long lists and long waits came before any car purchase. And when I say long wait, I mean years. But then again, that gave you time to raise the money for it. The design was outdated, there weren’t that many options to choose from, and some relatives told me some now funny stories about how they prayed for their car to arrive with most of the parts on it.

After the Revolution, we finally had choices. And we went for them. Foreign cars, used at first, brought from nearby countries, Germany being the leading supplier. I grew up with high-school friends that made a business out of driving to Germany in one car and returning in three. They would work on them for a while, then resell them for some extra cash.

Old school Dacia, Sandero and Duster

Everyone thought of new Dacias (which came with a slightly updated design and a few more features) as cheap, but ultimately bad cars and they bought them only because they found nothing better. Then came Renault, which bought Dacia in 1999. Soon came the Logan brand and things started to change in how Romanians perceived the cars.

Yet there still were plenty saying they’d buy anything else. With rather strong competition on the market, the number of choices was still extremely large and with a negligible price difference. But of course, the Renault brand standing behind Dacia meant something.

In recent years, the Logan and the Sandero brands have changed perception even more. They are top selling cars and Dacia is one of the most profitable companies in the Renault group. We had to see that Brazil, Germany and other European countries love our cars for us to start loving and consider them as a strong alternative. I have to admit that I am now making plans around a new 4×4 announced by Dacia and Renault, Duster, and I would love to have one!

Was there another way to get us to support Dacia sooner? Was there something more than the price that they could have shown us? Definitely! We grew up seeing Dacia as crappy. Maybe all the reactions from other countries should have been brought to our attention sooner, more often, until we were no longer trapped in what we thought we knew and we could have given Dacia a chance.

No matter how we got here, I am happy to hear Romanians are proud of their car brand. They smile when they hear how well Sandero is doing on the international market and they are looking forward to see what’s next. I for one heard of a very cheap car running on electricity. Rumor has it it will cost about 5000 Euros.

People are lazy. And laziness, when kept under control, fuels a lot of their drive to do things faster and better. Let’s be honest, we’d all want to work less and smarter, generate more income and have tons of time to enjoy those we love, our passions and our hobbies. Given the opportunity, we’d all prefer to work for 3 months and travel around the world for the rest of the year (or insert other pleasant pastime here).

We need to stay mobile and render parts of what we do automatic, so that we gain time. And when it comes to social media, well, we have taken automatic to another level. Auto replies, retweets, direct messages, scheduled posts, automatic posting of content to social media websites. It’s all working out great for us.

But when we go fully automatic, we also fail to monitor what’s happening. We know things are taken care of, so we can’t we bothered with those aspects anymore, we have other, more pressing matters on our hands. The danger? Automatic processes don’t stop to think. And that’s how a few days ago a quite famous blogger managed to retweet their about page. Now one really tweets their blog’s about page and I caught some quite negative reactions. I immediately thought it was an automatic tweet plugin gone wrong.

So go automatic when it suits you. We all need the helping hand. Or about a dozen of them. But remember no piece of software can really be installed and then forgotten, no matter what their marketers tell you. Try to keep track of what you’re running and prevent minor mishaps that can make you look bad.

Those two concepts put together, not likely to win the “couple of the year” award, are they? And they shouldn’t, simply because guilt trips should never be part of business emails, especially when it’s the first email you send out!

Imagine this! You want to introduce your recently launched business. You mention your website, then jump to saying you have a kid who’s just turned two and add a link to cute photos of that kid. Then mention an obscure site you used to have but no longer exist. And finally, in paragraph 4 actually mention one of the services you provide. Nothing on your expertise, no reference to satisfied customers, no detailed skill set of your team. Just throw the baby in, that’s bound to work!

No matter how I twist and turn it, other than guilt trip, no other reason comes to mind for mentioning offsprings and showing photos to potential customers. Maybe, just maybe, if you were a photographer specializing in newborns and toddlers, there might be a reason for the photos. But saying your main quality as a business professional is having a child? It’s crazy! And the image of yourself you put out there has little to no chance to generating leads or sealing the deal.

Remember, you’re trying to build a business relationship! Yes, if you’ve had a client for years, a personal bond develops, you might even become friends and show eachother family photos. But if it’s a new client you’re targeting, keep it professional and tell them how you can help them grow their business. Honestly, they couldn’t care less about you as a dad!

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Happy Monday everyone! A new week has just started and I bring you a fresh reading list. Hope you find these articles useful and that you add your own findings in the comment box.

Motivation is paramount no matter what you do or where you do it (home or in the office). Jean Murray of Home Biz Notes has put up a list of 7 ways to stay motivated.

We all tend to distort the truth: when we clean up because parents come to visit (I do this extremely often), when we’re asked to say the first thing that comes to our mind, yet we stop to think. We have our reasons for it, but we all do it. This leads to Nami Dunfords simple conclusion: all customers are liars.

What should you do to build your brand? Apparently, it only takes 3 steps to knit it. That’s Drew McLellan’s recipe.

Mig of eWritings takes os back to traditional SEO. And she’s teaching us a little more about the Meta description tag. You know, those few lines that appear under your link on Google search result pages!

Do you think some people are difficult? They might think the very same about you! Barbara Rozgonyi shows us how to deal with such people by being one of them.

Brad Shorr uses silly wordplays to explain sales. More specifically the difference between spending and investing.

That’s all for today! Ejoy the new week and see you next Monday!

Are you wondering why I’ve kind of disappeared? Well, the reasons are two: my not feeling very well and Kayla chewing up my laptop charger. Does the last one sound a bit like the “Dog ate my homework” excuse? Well, at least it is funny! But being without my laptop really reduced my online time. Why? Because I have to get my boyfriend away from his computer and work without most of my tools. Then again I have no saved passwords and it gets into a big hassle very fast.

Bottom line, I want my computer running . At all times if possible. Now the big question comes: why didn’t I buy a new charger. Well, I couldn’t find one. In the big city, capital even, of Bucharest, with its 4 or 5 Sony Centers, there are little to no Sony Vaio chargers.

Why not use a universal charger, you may ask. Well, because Sony Vaios are so great and high-end and pretty, that the normal universal chargers don’t work on them… I’ve tried, about 4 different models! The guy from the place I tried to buy the charger from called a colleague, that’s how I found out they really don’t work on this series of laptops.

How will the problem be solved? Well, they placed an order, I’ll have my charger in two days. It sucks as this is my work computer, with all my files, billing software, etc. So what did Sony do wrong? They were nice enough to look for the charger in all their centers from Romania, found one, ordered it, I’ll go buy it in a few days. Problem solved!

Not exactly: if you provide a laptop that does not like universal chargers, you should make sure that in the largest city of Romania you have a few extras at all time. Otherwise, the next time I buy a new laptop, I might go with a different brand. Sony Vaio is not a cheap brand. It’s designed for business people. The kind that use their laptops intensively and are dead without them. Or they might be alive, but without purpose.

So what happens after your customer buys the product is very important if you want to make sure they buy from you again and again. We all agree that return customers are the greatest. But keeping them happy after the sale isn’t limited to providing amazing customer service. Availability of spare parts and making things move fast is as important. If you have this huge channel targeting new customers, old ones will end up feeling overlooked, unappreciated, upset. And if there’s anything they did not like about your product before, that will become a deal breaker all of the sudden.

Will I buy a Vaio next time? I honestly don’t know. I was pretty sure beofre all this hassle.