For the holidays, the Fifth Ring Houston team went out for dinner. Since we are communications professionals, we notice things that sometimes go unnoticed by the public-at-large.

Once dinner was finished, the waiter brought the check and an envelope with a special offer.  In an effort to have customers return, the restaurant provided diners with an envelope guaranteeing a prize. Service-type businesses such as restaurants typically give away coupons, but this was no ordinary BOGO (buy one, get one) offer. Instead, you had to bring the envelope back after the New Year and open it in front of your server. Then, and only then, could you receive your prize of some sort. Open the envelope before you were seated in front of the server and the certificate was null and void.

Even though we understood the premise of the offer, we instantly wanted to know what the prize was. A free meal? Two free meals? Even better, free dessert? The possibilities were driving the table crazy.

We even tried to peek, however the message we saw when we lifted a corner of the envelope was “No Peeking!” They knew we would be tempted and were one step ahead.

Hmm, this was tough. It made us all want to come back. The food was good, ambience casual and the service was attentive. It was then we began to appreciate the value in their incentive. They had the same thoughts we did and decided to act upon it to help retain their business.

Brilliant.

Too often companies fail to show the proof points or the “how” in their marketing communications. How is your product or service different from your competitors? How do you increase the number of hits on your website? Or how do you entice a reader to keep reading? For this restaurant it was how do you get all these people to come back again?

The answer on this night? The perceived value in the envelope.

What keeps your (potential) clients coming back for more? It doesn’t always have to be a prize, but it has to be something they value.

Learning your stakeholder’s value is no easy task, but the payoff can be just as sweet. It takes time, research, understanding and skill. Often, it requires the expertise of professionals like our Brand Positioning team. However, mere mortals—and PR professionals—can do this too, but it does take a little know how.

Now, in any regular blog, this is where you would get three to five tips on how to do this yourself, but clearly that wouldn’t be in keeping with the tone of this post. No, if you want to know how to hone in on what your audience desires, you’ll have to just come back next month, or give us a cal.

However, if you want to know what was in the envelope, it was a certificate for a free dessert!

After having attended ‘The Mighty Meet-up’, hosted by Fifthring earlier in the year and discussing crowd sourcing design websites and competitions, I have done a lot of thinking about the evolution of branding, logo design in specific.

We are currently in an era of design where less and less time and consideration are put into logo design with websites offering a ‘quick solution’ logo for as little as $100! The result is just that – a quick solution in a rapidly evolving field - which operates around extremely tight deadlines, seems perfect right? The more important question is are the big iconic brands of the world moving in that direction?

It seems more and more marketers devalue the specialized expertise involved in creating trademarks that reflect, enhance and enable positive business outcomes. For me a logo serves many purposes, however the most important has to be to provide differentiation between brands. Established brands often understand and value the process of having a strong brand, however smaller start up companies and local businesses often struggle to see the value in this, hence the booming work and presence in crowd sourcing design services. Trends change so rapidly in design that a logo needs to be timeless, of course, logos do evolve over time but generally with minor tweaks throughout the years to refresh the brand image and keep up with the organization which it represents.

All the ‘classic’ logos tell a story. Today's replacement logos say as little as possible. It's an interesting turn and an ever-evolving one. While the brand and the ‘brand experience’ reign supreme, it no longer seems to originate with an original logo, perhaps there will be a turn of events and once the market is saturated with generic, cliché, $100 logos the savvy business will turn back and look for something more unique.

One interesting observation of recent is the removal of type in logos amongst global companies (Starbucks, Apple, Nike, Mcdonalds to name a few). I have been trying to put my finger on the reasoning behind this, one huge advantage of having a symbol only logo is the benefit for global presence free of language barriers, perhaps there are further advantages.

What are your thoughts? What is the future for logo design and overall brand image? Does it move in trends? Has a logo's job description changed? Does our media-centric culture and highly exposed consumer negate the need for a story communicated from the top down?

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