One is table stakes. What is the ROI of a website? Of showing up in Google organically? Of a well designed logo? On some level, customers expect to be able to find you. You need to show up, and show up well, at the point that customers are simply exploring. That’s fairly untraceable.
The other is distribution, holistically. Tesla might not have “marketing,” but they have showrooms, launch events, and referral programs. Every successful business started with precisely one highly effective way to acquire customers. Marketing, on some level, is about making sure that acquisition channel is working, start to end.
As companies grow, everything becomes muddy. Sure, Tesla or Walmart or whoever is probably unable to undertake how their marketing is effective, but they also can’t attribute success to every engineering project or accounting effort. That’s normal and true everywhere.
"What is the ROI of...a well designed logo?" For me (a consumer), absolutely zero. What do I care what some company's logo is? I don't, and I also doubt that I recognize most of them.
Perhaps you've seen the images of fake pennys, like this: https://technicallyeclectic.com/video-best-practices-details.... If so, you know what I mean; you could show me a hundred logos, and I couldn't tell you which ones are real, much less which of those real ones belong to which company.
And yet many companies spend an inordinate amount of time trying to decide what the best logo is, and then a few years later they decide to "refresh" it, or "clean it up", or "give it a facelift." To which I say, waste of time.
A sample size of one, but, I was able to pick out the correct penny immediately, and coincidentally, I work in marketing (but more technical marketing than anything brand-related).
In defense of the brand folks I know, I don't think any of them would say that the ROI from a well-designed logo is your ability to pick it out against a fake one. Sure, a poorly-designed logo would be one you would not be able to recall, but maximizing ROI from a logo is not maximizing your recall of it.
When my company rolled out a new logo a few years ago, some of the biggest selling points were making it consistent and easy to use, particularly in conjunction with our product names, which reduced time spent by marketers working around a hard-to-design-around logo. It also focused on make our workmark clearer, which was a real issue because even a large number of our own employees mistyped our company name as CamelCase instead of two words, which has real implications for trademark defense.
Yeah, sometimes logo refreshes are unnecessary. But not always. More often than not _you_ are not the end user benefiting from the changes.
One is table stakes. What is the ROI of a website? Of showing up in Google organically? Of a well designed logo? On some level, customers expect to be able to find you. You need to show up, and show up well, at the point that customers are simply exploring. That’s fairly untraceable.
The other is distribution, holistically. Tesla might not have “marketing,” but they have showrooms, launch events, and referral programs. Every successful business started with precisely one highly effective way to acquire customers. Marketing, on some level, is about making sure that acquisition channel is working, start to end.
As companies grow, everything becomes muddy. Sure, Tesla or Walmart or whoever is probably unable to undertake how their marketing is effective, but they also can’t attribute success to every engineering project or accounting effort. That’s normal and true everywhere.