LaRoy Kingsley,
Kranzler Kingsley Communications

If you want to look at it on the big picture take the Nike Swoosh. You don't have to see a name with it, you don't even have to see a tennis shoe. That's image; that's a logo. But image varies a lot as to whether a company is brand new, if it's an up start or it's well-established company.

The image, the look, the logo, it's the personality. It's the outward face before people enter the facility and actually have dealings with the business.

I think it's vital, I really do. Especially an upstart company. If they're brand new and just getting off the ground, people don't know what they're going to be dealing with. People walk in the door, they don't know what kind of service they're going to be getting, they don't know whom they're dealing with. It's like face value. It's like meeting someone across the room and you look at their face, you formulate impressions whether they're a warm person, they're very aloof, they're standoffish, etc., etc. Then once you meet them you think that wasn't anything like I thought.

Different personality traits within people are going to draw them toward something that might be a little more wild and extravagant. Or they might have a little more conservative look.

A skateboard company. They're going to have a very defined market, so they can get very extravagant to appeal to that group of people. They're not going to be selling a lot of skateboards to 80-year-old people.

Where a bank, for example, can deal with people from eight to 80 and all gametes in between.

There's definitely been companies as you've driven around town and you see this sign up, and you think, "What the heck is that?" And you just have this feeling that they're not going to make it, they're not going to survive.

On the other hand, you see maybe they do teaser ads or you hear about a company coming into town and all you see is their logo and you think, "Wow it looks like it's a well run, well managed company and they're going to offer a good product."

It's not everything. It's very important part of the first impression. There are many companies that have gotten by because of outstanding service and great product. There's a saying in the business, "Great advertising never sells a bad product twice." So no matter how good it is, the outward image, if it doesn't fulfill.

We like to start with research and try to find out what people's attitudes are toward a certain business or a certain industry, toward different groups of people are going to look at different things differently. Taking into account what the market is, that's the most important thing. Because you can start with a lot of blue sky and say, " Jeez. I hope people like it," but if you start out having some good solid knowledge about what the possible customer base is thinking, what they're looking for in a bank. If you're constantly hearing what they want is strong, stable, big, large, than that's probably the image you're looking for. If you constantly hearing that they want friendly, then that's probably the image that you're going to want to work towards. I think that the market is probably the place to start, having a real good feel for who the people are in that community.

You don't want to make a promise you can't keep. To have your logo say we are the biggest and we deliver the best product and then not carry forward on it.

The Star Wars movie is a great example of that. It received such monumentous hype before the movie that there's no way that it could possibly live up to that hype. So when they went in they were expecting something that just blew them out of their chairs, that they had never seen before and it couldn't possibly deliver on that. On the other hand when you walk into the video store, you think I'll give that a chance. You watch it you think, that's a pretty good movie. You go to work and tell your friends, I watched a pretty good movie last night. You're not going to come and say, what are you going to say about star wars, You're going to say, it's not as good as I thought it was. That's the one thing you want to be careful of.

You can change it. You can alter it. You can send it in a little different direction. You can polish it up; you can get it up to date to make it representative of our times. You can do a total and complete face-lift in terms of your outward appearance. If the image really changes that's whether it's carried through to the entire organization. Again, you can change it outside, but once you get inside if it's the same old place, same old attitude. It's not really changed.

The logo itself, you have so many opportunities to market your image, so many different avenues than what you had 10 years ago. We have the Internet and web pages and television is becoming more and more sophisticated. You have high definition television coming in, so you need to make sure the logo itself is going to be multi-media friendly from a straight up form on a matchbook cover, all the way to a multi-dimensional visual presentation on the web.

Before we proceeded with this, we do research for this facility on a quite frequent basis. It's always trying to keep touch with where you're at in the market place. What people are feeling. what trends may develop. So we have bench mark surveys that go back to '89. And then we ask the same questions that we asked in '89, again in '95 and then again in '99 and you see how the changes go.

We have an attitude now that I think you're going to hear a lot about is branding or brand awareness. The companies that are really going to succeed in the next millennium are companies with brand awareness. They should be able to put their logo on virtually anything and sell it.

Our feeling is companies that have a strong brand awareness and do a good job of marketing that are going to be the ones that are going to be the most successful when it comes to the next millennium. The marketplace is becoming more and more crowded. People can get the services that they used to be able to get only at their corner store anywhere. All they have to do is sit down at their computer, drive around the corner and there's a competitor.

Competition is everywhere. Only the ones that carve out a strong brand awareness are going to be the ones that continue to move forward. On a national level you can look and say Nike, Saturn, AOL, and CNN. You can look at any of those and those are brands with strength that they can branch out from and carry that brand name and know that wherever they branch out to they'll be successful. There are companies that have lost that and didn't carry that brand name.

Look at Chrysler in the '80s and that whole transformation that they had to go through. There was a company that was 100 years old, and was rapidly disintegrating before somebody actually took it and now Chrysler has a very strong brand name. Brand awareness and brand loyalty. The ones that can carve that out are going to be the ones that succeed.

There's a company called Energy One. The President and CEO says they will be selling energy off the shelf at Walmart. It is the company that has the stongest brand awareness that is going to win that battle.