Do you get Derek Acorah to consult on that?
It bugs the hell out of me too. My Daily Mail reading father delights in professing horror that companies ‘waste so much money on pointless branding exercises’. Yeah Dad, let’s not change anything ever and end up 30 years down the line going bust because the company has failed to keep pace with market conditions and looks and behaves like a dinosaur. Like Your company, Dad.
People like my Dad think branding doesn’t affect their consumer habits. People like my Dad are kidding themselves.
Ha! Perhaps staff would pay more attention if we did.
Sadly, fierce competition amongst agencies means that too many companies now demand this pitch stage for free - a process that can cost a design agency thousands. There was outrage in the design world when the London Olympic bid held an open competition to design the logo (the old logo - the one with the ribbon), as it seriously cheapened what is a serious profession.
I love you. Will you be my next client?
Ever since it was pointed out to me I simply cannot see anything other than an act of fellatio when I see that logo, however much I’ve tried to see it for what it’s meant to be. Heck, maybe that was the idea.
Sorry, no budget. In fact, when we set up a side business I was very glad that we got all the design/artwork from the original company. Developing that sort of stuff is costly.
The only reason I have such respect for the Graphic Artist is because I have tried (and failed) to develop some graphic elements myself. I know what I like, but I certainly cannot make it happen myself.
Of course, I lose a bit of respect when someone pays for a bit of graphic design, gets a nice piece of work, but not in a format that is useful - our friends got a motto for their pub (which I like), but the work was delivered as a JPG 
One day I am going to redo it into something I can scale.
Si
I heard a story (most likely apocryphal) that when Sun changed their logo from a square on edge to a square on its corner, Scott McNealy instructed his salespeople to hand out their existing business cards at an angle, rather than replace them.
The first logo my company acquired (and mind you, just the logo), it was about $15k. The project manager assigned to this wanted the billing to be broken down into its requisite components. This took like 10 months (I’m exaggerating, but it was something that long), and during the entire phase, I said nothing in these meetings (no legal questions). The PM thought he was making a killing because he go the IP rights for $15k too (after a very long protracted conversation). The rest of the fees: color palette, styling, research (I think this was just the firm giving themselves busy work), launch procedures, etc. was another $200-215k. This process took so long that we encourage vendors to give us flat fee pricing (but we also don’t pay as much anymore), or we’ll pay time and materials for a mock/draft presentation so that we have a list to choose from (this isn’t working out so well).
Heh. I like my Net App sales reps. They’re a lot better than those EMC fools that EMC keeps throwing at us. Unfortunately, I have to deal with EMC b/c we happen to like their storage solution better (though I think Net App is supposed to be the technical leader).
Anyway, we joke around here that it looks like the Net App logo is giving us the finger.
Precisely because all logo’s are done professionally nowadays, some companies can get extra attention by having totally amateurish logo’s.
A Dutch example of this is “Waterbeddenconcurrent”, a waterbed discounter. This is a national chain, not an Mom and pop store !
Their commercial featured the company’s CEO, lying on a king-size waterbed, surrounded by awkward blonde bimbo’s. The backdrop was an ordinary yellow curtain. The lighting was terrible. The whole impression was that this company was cheap, and I mean CHEAP. So, their water beds would be cheap, as well. 
I will never forget that commercial. Googling it yielded a couple of advertising agencies who said it was their favourite commercial.
Heh. I was somewhat surprised when I first encountered the Cameron Compression logo page.
I don’t know if anyone was hired to design my company’s logo or not – it looks just like the logos of two of the other corporate divisions. All three are circles with the division’s three-letter abbrieviation inside; the rail division has a little outline of railroad tracks, the marine division has horizontal blue lines for water, and the engine division has three little lightning bolts and the horizontal blue lines.
At one small place I work, the boss who always said “I’m not a designer but I like to think I have a pretty good eye for this kind of thing” kept making adjustments, revisions, revisualizations, reinterpretations, etc. The logo went from a simple graphic design to something more portrait-like, from typography to art to photograhy, horizontal to vertical, from red, to blue, to green and so on.
After 11 months and dozens of iterations, she finally signed off on… the very first design that was submitted.
That’s why logos are so damned expensive!
Well, this thread inspired me to go see what the status of Carnegie Mellon’s stupid-ass “tilted square” logo was. I’m thrilled to see that they ditched it.
When I was at school there, I remember people bemoaning the millions of dollars spent to create and implement that logo. 'Cause it was a square. Tilted 14 degrees. And most of all, it was just really lame. For all the history and lore and weird ass stuff about that school, the best they could come up with was a tilted square? It’s a whacked-out place. I mean, the school color is plaid. Need I say more?
Here’ssome history of the rise and demise of the tilted square if anyone’s interested. They left out the part where everybody laughed at it because it was weak.
p.s. My best bud, also a CMU alumna, is a designer who has done lots of logo, branding, and corporate identity work. A few years ago, she pointed out the ubiquity of the “swoosh” motif in new logos. (Nike, obviously, was the trendsetter there.) Once she pointed it out, I saw swooshes everywhere! I thought she was going to die of the vapors when UPS announced that they were replacing their classic Paul Rand logo with a logo with a swoosh!
King County (the county Seattle is located in) recently changed the county logo from a crown to a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. They estimate it will cost a total of $600,000 over a few years to completely implement the logo. And this is a county government with limited reach, not a multi-national corporation. I can see where corporate rebranding can get into the millions quite easily.
Just wanted to add–I hope my above post isn’t misunderstood. I wasn’t criticising the amount of money that gets poured into logos and branding. I’m just criticising the results in one case.
Then again, maybe the logo is meant to suggest that everyone associated with Carnegie Mellon is about 14 degrees off-kilter. Which would probably be an accurate assessment.
This thread made me think of a pretty hilarious logo design flaw:
www OGC unveils new logo to red faces
(possibly a little NSFW )
Incidently, the article states the logo cost 14,000 pounds to create… Well spent!