Whether you’re starting up or looking to refresh your image, having a strong brand identity is crucial. While brand strategies can vary depending on your business, goal and product, one central element is key when designing your brand and taking your company or product to market – your logo.

The creation (or reinvention) of your logo will undoubtedly be a critical part of your brand strategy and in the design marketplace, an increasing number of businesses are utilising crowdsourcing platforms and creating logo contests in order to generate quality logo options that they can assess and review, ultimately choosing one to stand at the forefront their strategy.

Getting to Market at the Right Time

A logo contest via crowdsourcing can accelerate much brand success, rewarding companies with high quality designs that can be turned around quickly (at DesignCrowd for instance, businesses can choose from a 3, 5 or 10 day deadline).

Faster-paced economies and more demanding markets today also often require brands get themselves or their products to market more quickly to maximise their reach and in many cases, this cannot happen without a logo.

This is not about rushing through strategies or making short-sighted decisions, but about getting to market in a timely manner in order to leverage current industry trends, take advantage of any real-time opportunities and essentially get ahead of competitors. In today’s age, timing can be everything, and so can the right branding – and quick-turnaround logo contests have the ability to give businesses that competitive “get to market” edge. Working with an agency, on the other hand, can mean a logo will take weeks or months to complete.

Strategies & The Bottom Line

Logo contests also take place at a fraction of the cost (and time) that would ordinarily be associated with graphic artists or agencies – the fees for which can run into the thousands. “The experienced [designers] didn’t have a lot of competition, so they could command high fees. Crowdsourcing changes all that… Through the power of networking and the free market, costs come down fast,” writes Michael Hyatt, when discussing the traditional design industry.

This isn’t to say that logo contests are only for the poor at heart; huge brands with multi-million dollar turnovers are also crowdsourcing their logos as part of their brand strategies, drawing on a multitude of designs and strengthening brand interaction at the same time.

When it comes to brand strategy, the crowdsourcing model can be ideal for businesses that need a winning logo, but that want to manage their budgets in more efficient ways, spending less on redundant or “old school” design processes and investing more in other marketing areas that can promise a higher ROI.

Logo contests and their costs can make a critical difference to the way you manage your brand strategy financially, without compromising on the output. And since you can set your own budget and ultimately walk away if you’re not happy with any of the designs, the risk is very low from a financial point of view.

Maximum Creativity

I’ve also found that logo crowdsourcing is ideal for companies who have a clear brand strategy in mind, but who might not have a specific or detailed idea about what their logo should look like, since they’re not designers themselves.

Opening up your strategy to a logo contest is an ideal way for your brand to maximise the creativity behind your logo creation and also gain a clearer vision of what your logo could/should be; more designers ultimately mean more ideas, more creativity and more options to discuss.

“You gain access to a veritable army of people who are great at what they do,” says James Allworth on his logo project for the Harvard Business School, “and who come up with ideas that you hadn’t even imagined you wanted.”

At the end of the day, logo contests have the ability to strengthen your brand strategy in a multitude of ways, from getting to market to meet consumer demands to managing your target budgets more effectively and expanding your creative options by working with an entire platform of designers.

Are you ready to launch your next logo contest?

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