DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH AT LIPPINCOTT & MARGULIS
Has marketing research established some sort of basic rules that would apply systematically to the design of logos, or does the creation of a logo have to be approached each time as a unique problem?
In terms of logo development, what we generally do is conduct research prior to designing any logo.
There is the ideal way to develop a logo and then there are variations of that way. Generally, we would conduct research with the market who would be exposed to the logo to determine the attributes or the images that we want to communicate through the logo, and then we would take that information and develop design criteria. And then, we would take that information and develop design executions, different alternatives. Now, what will happen at that stage is varied: a client will either select one among many, or we will go back to the market to whom the logo will be exposed and we’ll find out which one of those particular logos conveys best the image attributes that we want to convey. That’s the ideal process.
So it is a very personalized process for each individual logo…
It is. Because different clients have different budgets; some clients may have the existing research that gives them the image objective that they want to achieve, some clients, for political reasons, don’t care for any other opinion and they want to make the decision their own.
If you have a client that falls, let’s say, in the same category as someone else you have already conducted research for, could some of the research done for the first one be relevant for the second one?
Not really. That hasn’t been the case.
I can see where something like that would work in package design, because I’ve been involved in a lot of design research. In package design there can be certain rules that you can establish, based upon the product categories. For instance, if you were going to be designing a package for soft drinks and the array of soft drinks is going to be ginger ale and club soda, you would put the ginger ale in a green bottle and the club soda in a clear bottle, and the label might change depending upon the brand. There are certain rules for food products, the cooler ones you want to use cooler colors, the warmer foods, that will be served warm, you generally want to use warmer colors… But we don’t have any specific rules in logo design.
Now, basically a knowledge of an industry might give us an indication as to color exploration. The design is of course always original and that’s based upon objectives or a history (sometimes we develop them on an historical perspective of some sort). We have made color studies that haven’t necessarily driven us to make a specific decision. We did one in the airline industry starting from the fact that many airlines have red, white and blue, or red and white, or blue and white as their colors. We showed customers these colors without any design and we ask them to describe the airline that these colors represented.
So in that sense, we looked at what the industry was doing in general and then we looked at other alternatives. And we received very different responses from consumers based upon what they imagined the colors to represent in the airline industry.
We’ve done a similar color study in the frozen dessert category: certain variations of pink were perceived as being too garish, that the product that would come out of the dessert store would be too sweet.
On how large a group is research conducted?
That again depends on the client. We believe very strongly for logo research or design research, that qualitative research is more valuable than quantitative research. We like to speak to people about image and about imagery issues as opposed to just getting numbers and ratings. When we test a logo after it’s been designed, we’re not looking for consumers to make the decision for us and rarely, if ever, would we ask a customer, one of the target audience members, for his or her opinion as to which logo is best, or which one they prefer.
What we like to do is measure logos against image objectives to determine which one achieves the objective of the company best. From that, we make a decision.
And sometimes a logo will perform very well on many key characteristics and not well on others. That’s a balancing act. Then we have to evaluate each and say which ones are the most important, and can there be any fine tuning to the logo that we can do to maybe help us improve the attributes that didn’t seem to come out of peoples’ perceptions, as to what this logo stood for.
I can see where testing new ideas would make it possible to reach a more effective design, but don’t those new ideas depend on the designers’ personal understanding of the client’s personality, on their “intuition” more than on market studies?
Do designers make their decisions or create their designs based upon strictly the research, strictly their creativity, or do they factor in there the sensitivity of the client, the personality of the client?
I think all of those things come into play, and generally, any company who is developing designs basically goes at it with an open book. They’ll look at a variety of approaches that will be way far out.
A client’s predisposition would not restrict design exploration, but a client’s predisposition might determine the extent to which one design that’s further out on the spectrum, different from what the client might perceive as appropriate, one design succeeds over an other.
We wouldn’t typically look at all the designs and say:”well, the client will only like these three in this direction”, so that’s all we’d show. We would generally look at the broadest array possible and select from those the ones we feel the most appropriate, and within those that are appropriate try to find something that will also address a client’s concern.
And then the trick is always to try to bring them back where you feel they should be. That’s part of the sell end, and that’s when research becomes very important because sometimes the client will not want to stray very far from where they existed before and research will show that the image that they can achieve through using a different logo can take them to a level that they haven’t reached yet.
When you are working with a client who has been in business for a while, you have a base, an history to research from. What happens in the case of a new company?
The one issue that comes into play if it’s an existing company is : will they lose any equity by changing the old logo, and if so what aspects will they lose and what might they gain by a change, and how far can they go from their existing look. With new companies, as far as the approach to research, it’s not that much different. It’s just that we wouldn’t be able to look at any equity issue. Research would be the same: we would go to the target audiences and talk to them about the image and base the design criteria on image.
How long does it usually take between the first meeting with a client in need of a new logo and the final decision?
It varies. It depends on the extent of the research, but I would say the range is between 3 months to a year, if they do all the research.
For the specific airlines study that I mentioned to you, we were in research I think for about three months, before we ever went into any design, and then we did a massive qualitative and quantitative study.
There seems to be two distinctive schools of thoughts and practices in logo design: on one side the designers who “sign” their logos, are known personally for their creations and who seem to rely more on their personal experience and their intuition, and on the other side, agencies like Lippincott and Margulies where design is presented as the anonymous result of a collective effort involving both design and non design people…
The difference that you raise is traditional in this industry. Designers are very reluctant to allow non design people to tell them what they think is correct.
That’s why, when we conduct research, we believe very strongly that the customer, the target audience, is not the person to determine whether a design is good or bad. They’re never allowed to be designers (or design) judges. Again, everything that is researched from a design perspective here, is researched against image objective.
And that’s where the difference is. Many times designers are very concerned about that, and rightly so, because I’ve seen a lot of research where researchers will allow the customer to critique design, which really is not the purpose for why we go back to the customer.
Actually, many designers here, on occasion, have been uncomfortable with research relative to design and there as been a huge change when they see how it benefits the sell end of their designs later, because they have consumer responses behind what these logos are communicating, how it makes them feel about the company. It puts a lot of strength behind many of the designs they’ve created. It takes a lot of subjectivity out of the decision making process, it gives the client some facts to go by before making a decision.
Did you have any instance where once a logo was put on the market, it did not perform as expected?
My experience in that has been that it always has worked quite successfully.
I’ll tell you why else it’s successful, when we’ve also been able to use it. When a company is changing a logo, sometimes employees within that corporation feel that that change implies other changes in the company. Now, many times that’s the objective of a change, to give people the idea that there’s going to be a positive change in the company, something new to look forward to in the future. But sometimes people are uncomfortable with change, so the research can be used for employee groups to make them comfortable with the change, to tell them why the company is making a change: “we have those image objectives, and when we showed customers this logo they told us what the company behind this logo stood for, these five or six different attributes”. It gives them something that they can be proud of.
So it also helps the sell end of a new identity within a corporation.
Your involvement with your clients obviously goes way beyond designing logos. Would you say that logo design is only a consequence of the work done on the image of the client’s company?
We sometimes do a lot of image research and no logo design.
What we might do is do name change, or we might just provide them image, goals and directions without any design.
Naturally, out of these directions, if there are many changes in the corporation, they will then need to change some of the visual expressions for the corporation, based upon the new image, goals and direction. But our primary purpose is to give people the appropriate direction to go in and then give them the visual and the verbal expressions to present to the external audiences.
In that sense research provides designers with a “philosophy” to work from rather than guidance in the choice for the shape of a typeface or the color of a background…
Although, if an image direction was to be the leading industrial manufacturing plant in the United States, a designer wouldn’t normally think of using a serif italic type of typography with the logo. Their sensitivity to the expression of those visual elements would be driven by those criteria.
This should be obvious to any professional designer, without any research done. I would think that research has a more subtle influence on design…
Well maybe that was a simplistic example. But our image criteria can be one word and a whole paragraph definition as to what that image means to a particular audience. For instance, something like “quality” as an image would mean something very different to a traveler than it would to a purchaser of computers. That’s where those subtleties come in and where the language that the actual customer uses is woven into the overall objective.
It’s very useful. Some people might say that it’s not necessary, they can make a decision, but it’s very useful for all concerned. It can sometimes help you fine tune what you’ve designed. Everything might be wonderful but one aspect of a logo might be communicating the wrong impression to people. For instance, if they had done research on the Procter & Gamble symbol a number of years ago, they may have found that some people saw “666” in that logo. I never did, but that’s an example of where if there is something that could communicate something negative to people, that might have been thwarted and all they had to do was make that minor adjustment and it would be fine.
It’s a trouble shooting mechanism. It insures that you don’t make a mistake.
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