Thanks to the Internet, small businesses today have access to online guides and resources to better promote their businesses, products and services. This made small businesses realize the importance of brand development and marketing plan. Logo design is one of the most important steps towards an effective marketing plan and sustainable brand development.
It costs money and time to create a marketing plan and spend your resources on promoting your business and products. Many small businesses have a very limited budget to market their products and services. So, they decide to follow an approach where they can get more benefits while spending less resources, money and time. The Internet is a huge market, there are many people selling really bad products and services at very low prices. This leads small business owners to believe that they can find shortcuts and special offers to get their work done.
One such shortcut is to get your logo design by hosting a contest on so called design contest websites. Before we get to the point of why it is not a good idea to get your company logo designs from these contest portals, let us first discuss how these design contest websites work.
These design contest websites advertise themselves as a crowdsourcing marketplace. Crowdsourcing is a practice where a job is posted and anyone can participate in that job by agreeing that it is up to the advertiser’s choice whether or not to get paid for the work they have done. Design contest websites work on the same philosophy; you post your logo contest and set a prize for it. Designers at these websites then respond to your ad by sending you a finished logo design for your review. You only pay for the logo you like the most.
This may sound very intriguing to you, after all, you are getting so many designs and you only have to pay for one. But if you are a savvy business owner, then you must be wondering what the problem is.
Why it’s bad for your business:
Most of these logo designers come from developing countries in South Asia, China, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Therefore, they do not understand the cultural, artistic, modern and design needs of companies located in North America and Western Europe.
Since they work on designs where there is no guarantee of payment, they are not expected to give you very high-quality results. In fact, to make a decent living, they have to submit several designs a day and wait for payment. Which means that the work you get is of very low quality.
To quickly create new logo designs, these logo design artists carelessly copy other logo design ideas. This makes your logo design not so unique and original. Since a logo design acts as your business and brand identity, it should be unique and personalized to your business. A logo design that doesn’t meet these requirements doesn’t really make sense for your business needs.
There are many legal issues involved in contest designs. For example, the terms of your agreement on these design portals clearly state that neither the portal nor the designer will be liable for any damages you and your business may suffer. So if a designer steals someone else’s logo and gets sued for using your brand identity on his logo, then there’s no way you’re going to catch this logo designer and ask them to pay damages.
Conclusion:
All that glitters is not gold, so instead of hiring crowds to experiment with your business, the smart idea would be to hire a professional and responsible logo design company.