New Year is a time for new beginnings, and those new beginnings don’t have to be limited to your personal goals. This is also a great time to start thinking about giving your company a whole new look to meet the rapidly changing needs of today’s public.
Bringing Your Logo to Life
Why bring this up now? The announcement from Starbucks regarding its new logo and the evolution of the Siren in 2011.
Now, I have to admit to being able to identify the Starbucks logo from a distance, swerve across four lanes of traffic and slip into a parking spot for my daily fix, but I didn’t have the first clue what the “Siren” was. Turns out that’s the smiling face in the middle of the Starbucks logo, and for the first time she’s breaking out of her box.
The idea behind the transformation of the Starbucks logo was to demonstrate that Starbucks wasn’t just about coffee anymore. Sure, you can still walk in and get a venti white mocha caramel latte, and I highly recommend you do at least once before you die. But great coffee isn’t the only thing they’ve got going for them these days. From scrumdiddlyumptious egg and sausage sandwiches to oatmeal to fabulous scones, cookies, juice boxes, organic milk and an international assortment of teas, there’s something for everyone at Starbucks these days.
Breaking the Siren out of her circle was intended to demonstrate the ways Starbucks itself is shaking off the stigma of the “coffee house” and evolving into something more. Is your company breaking out? Or are you still stuck inside the same old box you sat in through 2010?
How to Do It
The other thing Starbucks discovered when creating their new logo (and the thing that really jumped out at me as a printer) was that technology allowed them to do so much more. You can catch the technological breakdown of the evolution of the new Siren here, but for now it’s enough to know that new technology and design techniques made it possible for them to take a logo that’s been around for almost two decades and give it a life of its own.
This is what I encourage you to do in 2011. Sit down. Look at your logo. Look at your company. Is it going where you want it to go, or is it time for a change? Are you moving forward, or are you spinning your wheels in the same rut you’ve been in for the past 40 years?
Ruts ride easily along well traveled roads, but you’re never going to see anything new. And sooner or later that rut’s going to get so deep you’re not going to be traveling anywhere at all. Your future deserves better than that, and so do you.
Thanks for tuning in to my little aside! Tune in tomorrow to find out what Starbucks was saying when it chose the color green for its new logo and what green can do for you and your winter marketing campaign.