I am surprised how much marketing momentum in the last few days was generated by more clearly defining internally our product purpose. It is making it easy to act and approve new logos, venues, and a forum for our customers. We know what to say "no" to and what to say "yes" to.

I made the final logo choices tonight with Renee for MadeOn's standard company logo and for twitter/facebook icon. They look great! The color scheme and the typographic layout with the solid thin line reflect some of the key values we wanted the product line to be associated with. Thank-you Sarah Dyess for an excellent and speedy work you have done for us! Next designer step is either to work on product specific labels or possibly to work on the website page headers. Not sure yet as to what is best approach so look forward to consultant's suggestions.

 

Reviewed the six logo drafts that we got back from designer. She did her drafts based on the values and product line MadeOn gave to her earlier. The drafts were excellent! With input from Renee at MadeOn, we told her our preferences. Designer also provided us with four possible color schemes, but she had them separated from the draft logos. Why? The logos were black and white only at this stage so we could focus on the structure of the images first.

We need a new logo for the MadeOn business, so we jammed up a worksession to list all the values that MadeOn does and does NOT want to project for its product line. We want a niche and clearly defined customer message. MadeOn wants the logo to portray one or more of those values while still giving it room to expand her product line.

Within an hour, we had what we wanted and we sent the list to Sarah, our logo designer to help her get started on some draft ideas for our review. We got the greenlight that it was sufficient for the designer to get started.

Here's the result of that logo worksession:

In a simple sentence, purpose of product line is to "Protect and nourish the skin effectively with premium ingredients that you can trust and understand so you can get back to your work"

Here are the values that I would like our MadeOn product line to be associated with:
efficient, strong, and powerful
clarity of purpose
understandable ingredients
transparency (we share on youtube what we do, my face and contact info is on the front page, etc)
fresh ingredients
premium ingredients
perishable ingredients
functional
for hard working hands
heals skin, nourishes and protects skin

In counterpart, here are some of the values that I do NOT want our line to be associated with:
not a long shelf life
not a novelty item
not girlie or teenager's lotion
not lacey
not foofy
not a perfumed lotion
not for old ladies
"not your mom's lotion"
not black/white themed
not a "secret" medicine

After listening to marketing genius Ed Dale, I sketched an iPhone storyboard concept for MadeOn's calculator of hard lotion ingredients. Features to be added later, but this should be sufficient as talking points with programmers.