What is the role of logo design within the financial sector? Do you even need one, and if so, how important is it to invest in a high-quality design? After all, you could theoretically spend £1,000s on a logo design (as many large businesses have done)!
As one of the UK’s few creative agencies specialising in the financial sector, our team at CreativeAdviser is uniquely positioned to help address these critical questions. Below, we explain why logo design matters to financial firms and why it needs to be placed within a wider branding exercise to get the best results.
We hope this content is useful and we invite you to book a free, no-commitment consultation with a member of our design team if you would like to discuss your own logo design project with us.
What is the purpose of a financial logo?
In financial services (and other industries), a logo acts as a central point of visual identification for a business. Whilst certain firms may rely more upon, say, a person’s image to provide this role (such as Martin Lewis for MoneySavingExpert), most financial firms will benefit more by using a logo design. After all, the people in your business might change over the years, but your logo could remain largely the same.
When you see a logo that you recognise, it usually also causes your mind to recollect the various feelings and experiences that you had with that brand. Ideally, you want your financial logo to conjure up strong, positive associations and connotations. This partly rests on the design of the logo – e.g. its “look” and “feel”, use of iconography (or lack thereof) and formality/informality.
How important is a financial logo to my business?
Whilst a financial logo plays a key role in shaping the attitudes of your audience towards your business, it is not the only driving force which forms others’ perceptions of you. Your wider branding (within which your logo sits) is, arguably, the most important.
Your overall visual identity plays a key role here. Your colour scheme, brand imagery, typography and website user experience (UX) all work with your logo design to shape your audience’s feelings, opinions and attitudes towards your financial firm. However, your branding also includes “non-visual” aspects too – such as:
- How quickly your team answers the phone to clients (and who does).
- The style, promptness, tone and substance of emails to clients and prospects.
- Your office culture (which people can pick up on very quickly when visiting your premises!).
- The competence, qualifications and size of your team.
- Your company’s proactivity within the community and charitable work.
In short, a financial logo is very important to any financial firm. However, it cannot carry your “brand” by itself. This is why, at CreativeAdviser, we often recommend including a branding project as part of a wider website design project – to give the latter the best foundation upon which to stand and communicate to audiences.
How do I create a great financial logo?
A great financial logo, first of all, should be authentic to who you are as a business. Clients and people who know you should look at it and instantly say: “That is definitely [A’s] company”. People are instantly put off by businesses pretending to be something they are not.
Another important principle is simplicity. There is a temptation to think that, the more complex a logo’s design, the better it is. However, this is usually not the case. Think of Nike, Apple and Amazon, for instance. All of them are very simple and memorable!
This leads to another key logo design principle – memorability. A key test of a logo’s strength is to ask how likely your audience is to recognise it if they saw it on the street (some days/weeks after seeing it for the first time).
Flexibility is also important. In today’s digital world, a financial logo may need to adapt not only to a website header and email signature but also to social media icons and browser favicons. Many designs are “squished” to fit these smaller spaces and simply do not work well.
Another important thing to consider is your company name. Many financial firms opt for acronym-based names (e.g. “ABC Financial Planning”) which often refer to the initials of the founder(s). However, these letters often mean little to your clients and even to staff, who may struggle to remember them amidst a sea of other financial planners doing the same thing.
A complete overhaul of your company name may not be necessary, however. An interesting case study from our portfolio is Castlegate, which originally referred to itself as CFM (Castlegate Financial Management). When working together on the logo design for their creative project, we suggested simply shortening the name to “Castlegate” and using this in the logo. The name carried far more meaning than the previous “CFM”, conveying ideas of financial strength, stability and reliability which the previous name struggled to achieve.
Invitation
Finally, how much should you pay for a logo design? Hopefully, by now, you see that it plays a key role in shaping your brand. So, you should be careful about choosing a cheap freelancer who does not specialise in financial services, and who may be tempted to cut corners due to your low budget. However, most financial planners are small businesses which need to be careful with how they allocate budget to projects such as these.
At CreativeAdviser, we offer two broad routes for financial firms considering a logo design and website project. The first is a more condensed project focused on your logo design, some brand collateral and a small website design (e.g. WMM; see our portfolio page for the example). The second route is called Transform Your Firm and takes you through an in-depth branding and website design project, which includes providing your business with a strong bespoke logo design.
Interested in finding out more? Get in touch to discuss your logo design project with us!
