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 branding and marketing plan. Logo design is one of the most important steps towards an effective marketing plan and sustainable branding.
It costs time and money to create a marketing plan and spend your resources promoting your business and products. Many small businesses have a very limited budget to market their products and services. Therefore, they decide to follow an approach in which they can get more benefits by spending less resources, money and time. The Internet is a huge market, there are many people who sell really bad products and services at very low prices. This makes small business owners believe that they can find shortcuts and special offers to get their work done.
One of those shortcuts is to get your logo design done by running a contest on so-called design contest websites. Before we get to the point of why it’s not a good idea to get your company logo designs from these contest portals, let’s first take a look at how these design contest websites work.
These design contest websites advertise themselves as a collective bargaining marketplace. Crowdsourcing is a practice in which a work is published and anyone can participate in that work accepting that it is up to the choice of the job poster whether or not they are paid for the work they have done. Design contest websites work with the same philosophy; you publish your logo contest and assign it a prize. The designers of 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 the smart business owner, then you must be wondering what the catch is.
Why it is bad for your business:
Most of these logo designers hail from developing countries in South Asia, China, Africa and Eastern Europe. Therefore, they do not understand the cultural, artistic, fashion 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 provide you with very high quality results. In fact, to earn a decent living, they must submit several designs per day and wait for payment. Which means that the work you get is of very low quality.
In order to quickly create new logo designs, these logo design artists carelessly copy ideas from other logo designs. This makes your logo design not so unique and original. Since a logo design acts as your brand and business identity, it must be unique and personalized for your business. A logo design that doesn’t meet these requirements doesn’t make sense for your business needs.
There are many legal issues related to 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 that may occur to you and your company. So if a designer steals someone else’s logo and they are sued for using their brand identity in their logo, then there is no way you can catch this designer logo and ask you to pay the damages.
Conclution:
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.