The Pros and Cons of Casting Bigger Nets

Our decision to use a crowd sourcing service to generate our new logo has provided us with a ton of feedback – both positive and negative, and a number of lessons learned.
 
We are extremely pleased with our logo; it stood out among the 250+ submissions we received, and was even complimented by other competing designers. We offer kudos to the other designers who participated in the project as well, we had so many great ideas to choose from, and it was not always easy to separate the “wheat from the chaff”.

Our decision to crowd source the development of our logo was based on a variety of reasons, but mainly that we did not want to take too much time focusing on ourselves when we are presently so dedicated to our clients. 

We also felt that the potential downside of this process (receiving many off-target or poor quality ideas that waste our time) would be offset by our experience in having managed designers before and having overseen the development of numerous logos before. Knowing the importance of providing a detailed plan to a designer, we focused a good amount of up-front effort on making sure that our initial project statement contained enough information for any decent designer to come back to us with an initial proposal.

Also knowing that it is important to provide feedback to a designer during the creative process, we invested a good deal of time in engaging those designers that submitted ideas we liked.

One of the comments that was repeated from a few different friends was that it sounded like we were embracing a ‘wikinomics’ approach to the logo development, and in a sense, this is right.

We saw the crowd of designers that gathered to participate in our project not only learn from our the comments we posted, but also from each other. It was interesting to see how many designers would notice favorable comments on logos and try to submit similar ideas, sometimes even obvious knock-offs of other designs we commented favorably on.

We’ve also seen a few people voice criticism with our choice, or with the way we managed the process. We have learned quite a bit.

Building a new logo, (building a new brand for that matter), is a time consuming task.  If we would have used one of our regular designers, the task could have taken several weeks to complete. This is not to suggest that we lack confidence in our regular designers. We just weighed the pros/cons of condensing the process, and we also wanted to learn firsthand about the crowd sourcing process. We’d seen this done for other companies, but we had never used it for ourselves before.

And among the pros to this process: within ONE week, we had approximately 90 designers submit more than 250 ideas (nearly 40 per day). By monitoring the daily flow of new logo ideas, we were also able to pick a new logo within one day of the project closing. We posted more than 200 comments to designers during the judging process, resulting in many designers coming back with variations on their ideas or new ideas altogether.

We are a small firm. And while are enjoying taking some of our own medicine with the rebrand of our company, we prefer to execute and deliver results for our clients. Our rebranding effort will be coming to a close soon, and the process has been smooth (for the most part), allowing us to not falter in our services.

Have you ever had a marketing project that has been drawn out and taken too many turns? We feel good about getting this taken care of in a week’s time, and this hilarious video shows how off-topic the design process can get when indecisiveness and poor communication enter into the equation:  http://shankman.com/happy-friday-video-2/trackback/