When You Should Consider Changing Your Logo

Google has recently announced a change to its logo, using the familiar four color palate combined with a san-serif font. Whether you like Google’s new look or not, there are considerations any business should make before updating its brand. This is not a process to be done on a whim, because your logo is probably the most identifiable feature of your enterprise. While customers might not convert based on this symbol, it’s a familiar presence on your products or services.

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Here are a few rules of thumb for when to update your logo:

Your Business Has Significantly Changed

Whether due to a merger or an expansion beyond your company’s initial scope, when an enterprise evolves, its logo should evolve with it. This change should be recognizable as such, so some elements should remain. Even if the original brand symbol barely resembles the current one, you should be able to trace a logo’s modern incarnation back to that first design.

In the case of Google, the company states the revolution driving the new design is that people are using its products on more platforms, and the new style is meant to make transitioning between them easier. Other sources note that Google has also recently changed ownership, suggesting the new look might be a response to that transformation.

There Are Reproducibility Problems

Some logos look good on one medium and horrible on another. If your business is expanding or new formats are being introduced, you might need to change your insignia.

This depends on how the logo looks and acts on the new medium. If it works and is inexpensive to reproduce, leave it alone. If it’s expensive to reproduce, you might have a greater issue, particularly if it still looks good. However, if it looks bad in the new format, then it’s probably time for a change.

Would the Change Make a Positive Difference?

This is a bit trickier to determine, as quite often you don’t know what difference a new logo will make until you introduce it. However, people quite often react negatively to simple changes. Perhaps the clearest case of this is when a company symbol has become linked to a negatively charged event. In that case, the business may change logos (even drastically) to dissociate itself with past failures.

Companies altering their logos for this reason should test the response to the proposed new design. If people are satisfied, they can move forward with the updates. If not, the revision probably isn’t worth the effort.

In the case of Google’s new logo, the response seems to be generally optimistic. However, we’ll have to wait and see whether the overall consensus is positive or negative.