This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Does your logo matter?
It matters less than your designer wants it to, but more than the typical
committee realizes.
If a brand is our mental shorthand for the promise that you make, then a
logo is the Post-it reminder of that promise. Without a brand, a logo is
meaningless.
Here’s a simple exercise:
Make a list of five logos you admire. As a consumer of design, draw or
cut and clip five well-done logos.
Got ’em?
Okay, here’s my prediction: each one represents a brand you admire.
Almost no one picks a swastika or the clever glyph of the bank who
ripped them off. That’s because logos are so wrapped up in the brand
promise that we imbue them with all the powers of the brand, ignoring the
pixels involved.
Yes, it’s possible for a terrible logo to adorn a fabulous brand
(complicated mermaid, anyone?). Many of the best brands have no
identifiable or memorable logo (Google, Sephora, and Costco come to
mind). And of course, a quick glance at your Helvetica clip sheet shows that
most brands couldn’t be bothered:

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No, you shouldn’t phone it in or be careless. No, you shouldn’t choose a
logo that offends or distracts people. Yes, you should pick a logo that works
in different sizes in different media.
But mostly . . . pick a logo, don’t spend a ton of money or have a lot of
meetings about it, and keep it for as long as you keep your first name.

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 CHAPTER FOURTEEN 
Treat Different People Differently
In search of the neophiliacs
In any group of one hundred people, pick a measure (height, weight, IQ
score, hair length, speed on the 50-yard dash, number of Facebook friends)
and you’ll discover a significant number clump around the average.
About sixty-eight of the hundred people will be close to the average.
Another twenty-seven will be significantly further away, and four will be
extreme outliers.
This happens often enough that we call it a standard deviation.
It turns out that this is especially true for human behavior.
Everett Rogers demonstrated that when it comes to style, technology, or
innovations, most people like what they have. They want to do what others
are doing, and they aren’t actively seeking novelty.
Some people, though, the fifteen or sixteen people on the left side of the
curve in the following graphic, are neophiliacs. They’re early adopters.
They want the better, the clever, the innovative. They’ll wait in line to go to
opening night of a movie, they’ll upgrade their operating system right away,
and they’ll read Vogue magazine for the ads.

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