Who Needs a Logo? Types of Business that Have to Create a Logo

It may seem to you unnecessary to make a logo for your business, but creating a good logo design for your brand or company may be the best move you can ever take for your enterprise. As we have seen in “What’s in a Logo? Why Corporate Logos Matter,” many reasons make logos important for brands and business corporations. 

True, not all enterprises NEED a logo. If you’re running a small store in your neighborhood, or you don’t have great business ambitions, you may not need to spend time and money trying to design the perfect logo. Some companies need to invest in logo design while others don’t really have to. Besides, there may be alternatives to a logo.   

But in hard-core business, logos are necessary. In an ambitious business project, it is difficult to make it out without a logo designed by professional graphic designers. If you’re starting up a business activity without a logo, you've got to get prepared to do a lot of branding on all platforms. For large corporations and in highly competitive sectors like computer graphics, software, digital technology, mobile applications,  social media, logistics, banking, retail, visual media and commercial real estate, logos are simply vital. 

Generally speaking, to do business today without a good logo is to do poor business. If you still don’t think so, this article can make you change your mind.

Do I Really Need to Make a Logo for My Business?

Designing a logo for your company or brand may not be your priority, but you should all the same ask yourself if your enterprise would benefit from a logo. What’s more, though you might feel you don’t NEED a logo, it's important that you decide whether or not you WANT one.

To be able to tell if making a logo is useful for your brand or business, you should ask yourself three questions. First, what are my business' marketing objectives? Second, what is my branding strategy? and, third, how far does the fact of having or not having a logo matter in the success or failure of my competitors' businesses? In effect, it’s critical that you consider these things before you create a logo online or elsewhere for your brand or enterprise. 

So it all depends on your business ambitions, plans and competition. The greater they are, the more you’ll need to make a professional logo that can help you carry out your commercial projects with success. In effect logos can be beneficial for any kind of business, but they are mainly useful for business that thinks big and sees large. 

if you don’t feel like going for a real logo, you may always try alternatives to it. You can use special fonts, colors and images if you think that can do for you. Maybe that's enough for you to tinker a sound logomark or logotype which can serve as identifier or brand image for your business. But if you're not sure that's what you want, then what you must be looking for is a real business logo.

Companies and Brands that Need Business Logos Most 

Some businesses are big, others are medium, and others still are small. Some companies have great expectations, ambitious plans and considerable budgets while others don’t. Some enterprises have to face fierce competition whereas others are alone on the market. 

Although every business or corporate activity should somehow design a great logo to be able to survive or grow, the facts just mentioned make logos more important to some business categories and types of companies than to others. Business logos seem to be of special use for the types of enterprise described hereafter.

Large Corporations

In the case of multinational firms and other large corporations, the logo is a vital necessity. On the boulevards and main streets of the cities and metropolises where such big businesses and their representations, divisions and offices work, to be able to make it out, stay on top and grow all the more, they need great, competitive and memorable logos. A mighty logo is compulsory for those corporations to stay visible in large and crowded cities with frenetic mobs and scattered with multitudes of other businesses and other logos. 

Indeed all big brands care for their logos. A large enterprise always makes sure their logo is well-designed and effective. For an idea about it, some companies had their logos designed by renowned artists and graphic designers. The famous logo of Spanish brand of lollipop and other confectionery, Chupa Chups, sold in some 150 countries, has been designed by Salvador Dali. Similarly, the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT have all been created by graphic design super star, Paul Rand. 

Large companies realize the importance of the logo, which is why they spend staggering amounts on logo design, rebranding and brand acquisition. True, some brands got great logos for a penny. Nike for example paid their swoosh for $35, and Twitter bought their legendary blue bird for less than half that amount ($15). 

But it was only providence (for proof, Nike’s logo is now worth $26 billion). Otherwise, the figures are dizzying. Let’s have a look: 

Competitive Industry

For obvious reasons, business activities with strong competition need logos more than non-competitive industries. In competitive markets, companies have to fight, sometimes even to death, for their existence and  shares of market, and one very effective way to do it is to have sound branding schemes with a competitive logo as spearhead. 

 In “How to Deal With Industry Competition,” Harriet Genever identifies 5 forces that drive industry competition: industry rivalry, threat of new entrants, bargaining power of customers, bargaining power of suppliers, and threat of substitutes. Genever sets up 10 strategies to handle such business competition, one of which is to “clarify your brand and message.” 

From there, she explains, “you need to ensure that your branding reinforces that message. The more accurately your branding represents what you’re trying to say, the more likely people will connect with it,” she goes on to say. Nothing seems more able to represent a company’s message and convey it better than an efficient corporate logo. 

Retail, food industry, hotels and travel services, banking and finances, the car industry, and the textile and garment industry are all sectors with a high level competition. However, some sectors are particularly competitive. According to the Human Resources Director (HRD), the top 5 most competitive industries in 2019 have been the following:

Top 5 Most Competitive Industries in 2019. 

Computer Graphics, Software and other Vision-Based Businesses 

Some industries depend directly on the image and its recognisability, and so they need the logos more than other types of businesses and industries do. That’s certainly the case of the Computer Graphics, Software and other vision-based industries like television, videogames, digital technology, and social media. 

In the case of the software industry, a logo is not only important in the usual  sense. That is, a logo’s significance is not limited in this case to its being part of market and branding plans of such corporations, such as market penetration, market development, market diversification, competitive assessment and intelligence, and product development and innovation. 

In the world of the software, computer graphics and other visual products industry, icons and logos are a new mode of communication – a genuine new language. The logos and icons of Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe System, Dell Technologies, Google, YouTube and Facebook companies and others we click on are units of a new stage in the development of human communication. Those icons and symbols are the ‘letters’ of an advanced – extremely quick and concise – post-human kind of language.

This double importance of the logo for the software, digital and visual communication industries, added to the fierce completion which characterises this particular market, may explain why the Symantec logo is top of the list of the most costly logos as we've seen further up. 

Ambitious Start-Ups and Small and Medium Enterprises 

Start-ups particularly need logos. For one thing, they need to build a business identity for themselves and to signal their presence to their potential consumers and everyone else.

Informed start-ups make up their identity by building a consistent and coherent narrative about themselves, establishing sound marketing, branding and advertisement plans and undertaking as much related activity as possible. Success in all of this is hardly thinkable without a sound logo.

In later phases of the development of your enterprise, if you have a great logo, it will, among many other things, fight your competitors and literally sell for you on the market. On some platforms in particular, such as social media, the only immediate sign of your presence is your logo, though that’s also valid to a far extent in real life. 

Every ambitious business company needs a quality logo to look professional, build a unique brand identity, be recognized, face competition, sell the max and, above all,  be able to survive as a small fish in an ocean of sharks. But this holds especially true for start-ups and for small and medium businesses who would like to go far. They will have to make the most of crucial tools of business survival and development like graphic design and, most of all, the logo. 

A case in point Canva, the Australian graphic design platform used for creation of social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content, and its young founder, Melanie Perkins. Perkins is one of the youngest female CEO's of a tech start-up worth some A$1 billion. At only 30, Perkins was the second richest woman in Australia in 2021.

For Perkins, graphic design is a key factor of success in business communication, not least for start-ups. As she declared in an interview with Kit Warchol, “everywhere you look, design has become more critical to communication.”