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Design Brand Identity Basics Introduction to Brand Identity What is the Value?

Li Mbo
Li Mbo
5,096 Points

Why would a company pay 200 million dollars for a logo?

3 Answers

Codin - Codesmite
Codin - Codesmite
8,600 Points

There is a lot of work, underlying marketing and research that goes into a lot of these designs. For example Facebooks recent rebranding cost millions and took a huge team to complete. All they changed was the font.

Branding can make or break a company and large companies or fortune 300 companies will put a huge amount of money into their branding to get it perfect from a marketing and design perspective.

If your branding/logo doesn't represent a good visual representation of your company and what your company does, your brand will struggle to relate with customers.

You aren't just paying for a quick illustrator/photoshop thrown together logo or brand you are paying for all the marketing research and knowledge that was undertaken to make the logo or brand (There was probably 500 or more other BP logo's designed within this 200 million before they settled for the design they use now).

*Edit - Looked up the article myself and they only paid £4.6 million for the sunflower re-branding in question. It is going to cost them £132 million to rebrand all their assets with the logo (vans, petrol garages, trucks, website etc etc)

Li Mbo
Li Mbo
5,096 Points

Thanks for the great info Ashley! Marked as Best Answer. To be honest this still seems to me like an overpriced and unnecessary cost. Microsoft for example did the rebranding themselves and it costed nothing compared to BP.

Codin - Codesmite
Codin - Codesmite
8,600 Points

This isn't actually true, Microsofts rebranding took so long and cost so much that it's almost impossible to financialy calculate just how much their rebranding cost. Just because it was in-house doesn't mean it didn't cost them a small fortune, they have wages to pay to their design teams. They also hired in new talent at the time of the rebranding "Andrew Kim". The cost of their rebranding is estimated to be one of the most expensive yet. They even nearly lost most of their investors because they were discontent with the amount of time and money it was costing.

They roughly estimate the in-house designer wages would of been about $1 million to $2 million but as with BP the major cost was changing the logo's on all of their assets, websites, mobile phones, vans, adverts, buildings, software etc which they estimate to of cost well over $500 million.

Good example of a company that hasn't paid alot on their branding would be Twitter, They purchased their original blue bird logo on iStockphoto for $16 and have only made minor changes to the logo since.

edit: http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2012/7/3/the-next-microsoft.html < this is the rebranding that Andrew Kim initially proposed that went viral before Microsoft hired him, I think they should of gone with his original proposal :P

Just out of curiosity what is the font used by fb for name on mobile devices?

Codin - Codesmite
Codin - Codesmite
8,600 Points

Tahoma on the web version. iOS uses default iOS font Neue Helvetica. Android uses default Roboto. The Facebook logo is a custom variation of Klavika.

Thanks