To change or not to change…
Posted by
Matthew in
Church on
Thursday, April 2, 2009 |
3 responses
I mentioned before that we’re working on re-branding our church with a new total identity package. We’re firmly convinced of the need of the identity package because we don’t have one at all right now, and we know that it will tie together our communication pieces to make a stronger whole.
The question is: do we change our logo?
I say no. I say no for one simple reason – our logo is universally recognizable in our community and changing it would result in people having to relearn our “brand.”
What do you say?
By the way, at right is what our designer has come up with for our stationary pieces. Click to make BIG. I welcome (and solicit) your comments here too. (She doesn’t read my blog.)
Related posts
3 Responses to “To change or not to change…”
Leave a Reply
Hmmmm…my opinion may not be exactly what you want to hear…but I’ll try my best.
1) I agree that the logo should not be changed or appear any less than it has in the past! It is recognizable in the community, and honestly, new logos (drastic or not) tend to make me think that the “church” is either new or has changed in some major way (drastically exceeding that of changing the mission statement, etc.)
2) I do, however, think that the Jesus logo (perhaps in one place and not three) is catchy and that’s really exactly what you want – you want church members and the community to recognize the church’s mission and vision statement as easily and as readily as they did the FBC Belton logo. It’s also consistent with the website. However, one has to be careful to not overdo it as well….
Regardless, the FBC Belton logo has to stay!
I’m not sure I still believe in the “power” of a logo.
I know for sure that a weak logo or one that looks like every other logo or one that seems to be slapped together by a committee with a clip art collection, well, those sort of logo designs for sure hurt an organization’s credibility with people who aren’t already connected. I’d go so far as to say that they also reinforce the perceptions of those already connected, perceptions that perhaps this is just the best this church can do so it will have to be good enough.
None of us wants to be thought of as “almost as good as the real world.”
Communicating the true and noble heart of who you are as a local church, your real “identity,” is not a function of your stationery.
I think that we as church leaders sometimes have this notion that our work and our ways are “universally recognizable in our community.” Now I don’t live in Belton, so I obviously can’t say this with absolute certainty, but I’d bet you’re radically overestimating the worth of that logo as part of the church’s “brand.”
I may be a curmudgeon, but to me the logo feels dated. I’m fully in the camp that says come up with something new. I love the bold and unmistakable embracing of Jesus as the center of all that you are, but graphically it’s, well, cliché.
If it’s branding you’re really concerned about then work on branding — the management of how people perceive and form opinions about your organization, thus influencing the likelihood that they’ll engage and stay connected with you.
For all of us, that needs to start with who we *really* are and what we’re *really* doing, not with who we “say” we are and what we “say” we’re doing, nor with a new stationery package or logo design.
[...] paying for stationary design utilizing our old logo, I was approached by one of our former interns (now a full-time staffer) [...]