What’s in a logo? What should a graphical representation of your brand or company really say?

There’s a lot of buzz right now because London’s Olympic committee spent almost $800,000 (and a year’s work) on a controversial new logo for the 2102 Olympic games. And as anyone can tell, it’s crappy. Choppy and misshapen, it looks like some pieces of paper cut out and slapped together by a kindergarten kid.

A good logo is an empty vessel, a clean, simple abstract image. It should have no intrinsic meaning until you bring meaning to it. For example, the swoop of the Nike logo meant nothing until the company filled it with meaning by infusing it with their values.

If your company needs a logo, hire a graphic designer to create a simple, abstract image. Add your company name is nice letterforms. Don’t worry if it doesn’t “say” much, if anything, yet. As Seth observed, later you’ll add meaning — i.e., the values your company represents to your customers.

Do that and you’ll save about $798,000 on your logo. And you won’t have 50,000 people signing a petition to ditch it.

How do companies make money? How much do (can) they make? Those questions pop up in the minds of anyone who is contemplating starting a business.

New York magazine wondered, too, and sent reporters out to dig up the facts and stats for a variety of NYC-based businesses, from cab driver to drug dealer to private eye, from four-star restaurant to diner to pizza joint, from department store to quick-copy shop to sex-toy shop.

The results are fascinating and revealing — although keep in mind these are New York City numbers. Your mileage may vary. Remember, too, the figures were provided by the companies themselves. Some may be motivated to fudge the facts a little, either to make themselves look bigger — or to avoid embarrassing questions from the IRS.

A few fun examples:

• For a private eye, men are the best clients. They’re nearly always wrong when they suspect a cheating spouse, but they often won’t believe it and continue the surveillance. Women, on the other hand, are 90% correct when they suspect their husbands of straying.
• Pfizer, the giant drug manufacturer, makes average gross margins of 60% on its products.
• Goldman Sachs’ most-glamorous activity is investment banking, but that’s its least-profitable activity. Trading and investing are best, with 41.5% profit margins.
• Even at $28 per ticket, the MOMA loses money on every admission. Their cost per visitor is more like $56.

So — should you start a business in the one of these fields? If not, what other areas do you see as most promising right now? Why? Let’s discuss in the comments.

New York Magazine via 37 Signals

The other day I wondered about Dell’s mixed marketing message. Now it’s Wal-Mart’s turn.

Traditionally the low price leader, Wal-Mart has been trying to swim upstream — I mean, move upscale. They want to hold on to their marketing base while attracting upscale consumers shopping for higher-quality goods.

But a confidential report based on interviews with scores of consumers concludes that being the cheapest store in town — gasp! — somehow conflicts with what upscale consumers are looking for. The chain’s low prices suggest they sell low quality goods, which turns off upscale consumers.

… (T)he report says the chain “is not seen as a smart choice” for clothing, home décor, electronics, prescriptions and groceries, categories the retailer has identified as priorities as it tries to turn around its slipping store sales, a decline likely to be emphasized Friday during Wal-Mart’s shareholder meeting. via NY Times

“The Wal-Mart brand,” says the report, “was not built to inspire people while they shop, hold their hand while they make a high-risk decision or show them how to pull things together.”

On the other hand, Target, with its designer-inspired clothing and furniture, is perceived as the ‘new and improved,’ while Wal-Mart often feels like the ‘old and outdated.’

Burt’s Bees is a great example of a small, homegrown Maine company that has grown into a giant by keeping things simple: simple products, simple packaging, even a simple marketing message. Founded by a Maine beekeeper and a graphic artist in 1984, the company has become legendary for quality and a down-home image. As the New York Times put it:

“It makes simple products using plain ingredients like milk, honey, beeswax and almond oil, selling them in cheerful, tongue-in-cheek retro packages. It appeals to a diverse audience using a retail distribution system that includes national (drugstore) chains, college bookstores and village gift stores. And it employs seemingly low-key marketing… without preaching a green gospel. This laissez-faire approach inspires word-of-mouth promotion.”

Viral marketing: a marketer’s dream. And bioy has it worked for Burt’s. In the last five years, the company has doubled the number of sales outlets (to 20,000) and quadrupled retail sales (now $250 million). Not bad for a company founded by a couple of hippies.

I’ll bet poor Burt, whose bearded face still graces the packages, wishes he still had a piece of the company. But he sold his share in ‘93, a year before his partner sold the company for $173 million.

Well, not quite. But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has opened the gates of its vaunted curriculum to the masses — no charge, no registration required. (No degree either, of course.)

MIT OpenCourseWare is an ambitious project to post all MIT courses on the Internet, open to anyone who’s interested. A “free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world,” MIT OCW requires no registration, grants no degrees or certificates, and provides no access to MIT faculty. All it does is open the doors to a great fr’ee education. All you add is time and effort.

Over 1500 courses are already available and more are coming.

Want to to change the direction of your life and career? As a recent New York Times column (written by a former attorney) points out, sometimes all it takes is a single non-credit course.

Sure, you can sit in classrooms for 16+ years, but no one can give you an education. Like Abraham Lincoln, you have to go get it for yourself.

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss — so you can work twelve hours a day.
-Robert Frost

Toyota didn’t get to be the world’s largest auto manufacturer by ignoring the details. Its kaizen (continuous improvement) approach can teach any organization a lot about quality, productivity and taking care of business.

The two main pillars of Toyota’s approach boil down to: 1) respect for people and 2) continuous improvement; constant and never-ending improvement in all areas. So say Peter Paul Roosen and Tatsuya Nakagawa, co-founders of Atomica Creative Group, who sum up Toyota’s lessons this way:

• Create manual systems first, then use technology as a tool to assist the process
• Emphasize constant learning
• Eliminate – don’t just reduce waste
• Build quality into everything.
• Create systems to respect and treat partners well
• Work with others but maintain your core competencies
• Chose friends and associates carefully. Associate with people who can help you and that you can help.

The Toyota process is a hybrid of best practices, say Roosen and Nakagawa. No wonder Toyota’s latest great outcome has been to become the world’s first mass producer of hybrid automobiles, winning over half the world market.

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