Chapter 9
PRODUCT

IN This Chapter
Product basics
Where do new product ideas come from?
Branding your product
Entry strategies

Introduction
Why do we buy products? Because they meet basic survival needs like health, safety or shelter. We also buy products that make our lives easier, make us look or feel better, or project an image we like. We buy to influence other people, to feel differently about ourselves, and to benefit others.
A product can be something tangible, like a pencil, a jacket or a car. But it can also be something intangible, like a software subscription or an insurance policy. A service is a product, too: Services meet customer needs by delivering benefits like time savings, comfort or peace of mind.
Entrepreneurs must think carefully about what their products represent to their customers. For example, a ski parka might be the warmest on the market, but how does it look and feel? How durable is it? What image does its label communicate? How many colors does it come in? Where was it made, and what materials were used? Does the manufacturer offer a guarantee and a return policy?
Each of these aspects of the product is important to how customers perceive it, and perception is what makes customers decide to buy one product over another. A business that understands all the facets of buying behavior is in the best position to build lasting customer loyalty.
Overview of Marketing Strategies
As we learned earlier, objectives are your goals within chosen markets. This could mean increasing sales by 35 percent in the next six months or having 100 new customers by the end of the year.
Strategies are your plans for achieving your objectives. These may include going after customers who are between 24 and 40 years old, or targeting a niche market for environmentally safe cleaning products. Your marketing strategies show how you’ve segmented your customers, and how you’ll position your business to show off your competitive advantages to those groups.
Tactics are actions dictated by your strategies. Marketing tactics might include offering a two-for-one promotion; creating a classified ad that emphasizes your customized service; or distributing your products through specialty boutiques. You can look at strategies as the “thinking” part of achieving your goals and tactics as the “doing” part. The Green Thumb Plant Care example below shows how objectives, strategies and tactics fit together.
Green Thumb Plant Care
Objectives | Strategies | Tactics
Increase profits by 10 percent each year over the next three years. | Sell, deliver and creatively place profitable plant accessories. | Develop a partnership with a reliable supplier of decorative pots and vases. Display new pots and make recommendations to office manager at quarterly meetings.
| Offer profitable fresh-cut flower arrangements and centerpieces for corporate events. | Develop a partnership with a reliable, creative florist. Provide clients with a photo brochure of available arrangements.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix consists of the Four Ps:
Product is what you sell, whether it’s goods, services or a mixture of the two.
Price is the amount you charge.
Placement is the method you use to make your product available to your target market.
Promotion is everything you do to communicate with customers about your product, price and placement.
The Four Ps look at these activities from the seller’s point of view. By contrast, marketing experts Chekitan Dev and Don Schultz created the SIVA model, which considers the Four Ps from the customer’s point of view.
Solution. A product is a solution for the customer’s problem. This underscores the importance of understanding consumer needs when designing and defining your product.
Information. Promotion informs consumers about your solution.
Value. What customers will pay depends on how much they value your solution.
Access. Placement decisions determine how and when customers have access to your solution. The best strategy is one that delivers access when, where and how customers want it.
As you can see, the Four Ps and SIVA are two sides of the same coin. Although this book uses the Four Ps model, keep the SIVA model in mind. The goal of your marketing strategy is to find the ideal balance of these elements.
Market Segmentation
Before we discuss each of these elements in more detail, let’s take another look at two crucial aspects of marketing strategy: market segmentation and target markets.
In the last chapter, you defined market segments by identifying customers with similar demographics and psychographics. The goal was to identify your target market, which is the customer group that’s most likely to buy from you.
As you develop your marketing strategies, think hard about the target markets you want to reach. Although it’s possible to target many customer groups at once, small businesses usually find it easier to focus on a primary target at first.
…
When I launched my business, money was tight just about everywhere. A lot of businesses were cutting corners wherever they could. For some folks, that meant cutting out cleaning services altogether. For others, it meant hiring undocumented workers for a fraction of what I charged. To say it was discouraging is an understatement.
Brian Rust runs Spotless Cleaning, a small office cleaning business in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. When he started out, he had nine regular clients, which was barely enough to support his three-person team. Although he had excellent references, Brian was having difficulty winning new contracts. A friend advised him to schedule a consultation with the local Small Business Development Center.
I put it off for a while, hoping business would pick up. But eventually things got bad enough that I finally took the plunge and got in touch with the SBDC.
I ended up with a consultant named Alison Neuland, who asked me two questions I’d never really thought about: What do I offer people, and how much is it worth? Lots of people can clean an office, so why would they want my team instead of someone else’s?
I thought about that for a while, but all I could come up with is that we do a really careful, thorough job. I could tell from the look on her face that wasn’t anywhere near good enough.
…
Product Strategies
Once you’ve identified your product, target customers and competitors, you need to create product strategies to ensure that your product is competitive.
This requires determining what stage of its life cycle your product is in, positioning it properly in the marketplace, and making shrewd branding and packaging decisions. The Product Strategies Worksheet addresses these topics.
Types of Products
Convenience products include widely available and generally nondurable goods such as dish soap, aspirin, candy, and most food and grocery items. Although most customers buy these products regularly, they normally don’t put much time, thought or effort into differentiating between them. Therefore, businesses usually market them in a wide variety of outlets for a low or competitive price.
Shopping products are goods that consumers invest more time and emotion into purchasing, such as clothes, televisions, furniture, bicycles, washing machines and computers. Unlike convenience goods, shopping products usually entail a process of research and comparison. Image, reputation, status and various emotional factors are more likely to influence buying decisions. Businesses that offer shopping products usually market and distribute them much more selectively than convenience products.
Specialty products target a small, specific subsection of the population that is willing to make an effort and pay a premium price to acquire them. This category includes luxury goods such as vintage jewelry, and one-of-a-kind items such as paintings, as well as industrial goods like arc welders and fume hoods. Distribution tends to be limited or exclusive, and prices tend to be significantly higher. Consumers tend to be more selective and may have a specific brand in mind. For example, someone who wants a Cartier watch will probably not bother comparing the cost or features of watches from Seiko or Rolex.
Product Life Cycle
To choose the best marketing strategies for your product, you need to consider which stage of the product life cycle it’s in.
Introduction
If you’re launching a new product, your primary goal is to make your target market aware of it and get them to try it. Because new products often face high startup and marketing costs, poor distribution, and sluggish sales, this tends to be the costliest stage for product marketing. On the other hand, competition is usually at a minimum.
Typical strategies include:
Identifying and engaging early adopters and trendsetters,
Establishing quality, value and market position.
Promotional efforts are narrowly targeted and focus on getting customers to try the product (e.g., offering samples, coupons or limited-time offers; or getting the product reviewed online or in a magazine).
Placement is usually limited at first, with a focus on the most promising outlets and channels.
Pricing is often low (penetration pricing) or high (price skimming, premium pricing).
Growth
Once a product has been accepted by its target market, the goal is to encourage loyalty while reaching new customers and defeating competitors.
Branding efforts should build trust by capitalizing on the goodwill of existing customers and distribution partners.
Placement strategy usually entails choosing new distribution channels in order to meet growing demand and reach new prospects.
Promotional efforts may target a wider range of customers, a wider geographic area or both.
Pricing tends to remain stable in this stage. Rather than lowering prices to compete, the business may add complementary services or features.
Maturity
At this stage, you’re likely to face widespread competition and slower sales. Features, benefits, value and branding become more important as consumers look for reasons to choose your product over competing brands.
Businesses often improve the ingredients, packaging or uses of mature products to attract new customers, recapture old ones and outflank competitors.
Pricing may be lowered in order to match or undercut competing brands.
Promotional strategy focuses heavily on brand recognition, consumer trust and other factors that differentiate the product from competing brands.
Decline
In this stage, the goal of promotion is to keep the product selling while it remains acceptably profitable.
Businesses may repackage or reformulate the product to appeal to new customers or reengage old ones.
Placement narrows and may include discounters.
Promotion winds down as marketing efforts shift toward newer products.
Other options include discontinuing the product, cutting production levels or costs, selling or leasing the rights to another business, or targeting a foreign market.
…
After meeting with Brian a couple of times, and getting a feel for his situation, Alison introduced him to a local professor named Ted Calderwood, who specialized in small-business management and volunteered twice a week as a business advisor.
Professor Calderwood told Brian that there were no green cleaning services in Elizabethtown, and that this could be a good way to stand out from the crowd.
He explained that federal and state offices had been switching over to GS-37 certification, which requires the use of environmentally safe cleaning products, and that larger companies were following suit.
He told Brian about studies that showed how these products had resulted in less absenteeism and unhappiness among workers, who often complained about the use of strong-smelling cleaners like ammonia and bleach. That meant that Brian could position his business not just as an exceptionally conscientious cleaning service, but also as a way to increase employee morale and productivity while doing good things for the environment.
The way he explained it, I reckoned it was a good bet. My main worry was that I’d be offering a new service. The first thing people were likely to say was that it would be too expensive, so I’d have to be ready to explain why it was worthwhile. Professor Calderwood had a chart showing that the cost was actually competitive for most green products, which was a big help.
There was more to green cleaning than using different chemicals, though. I could also change the way my team did things. Instead of sweeping floors, we could damp-mop them. We could also dust surfaces with a wet cloth, and use a vacuum with a dust-trapping filter.
By positioning myself as a business that was maintaining a healthy work environment, I could charge more than an ordinary cleaning service. And I could maybe even make the case that maintaining indoor air quality would require at least a couple of service visits a week.
…
Your Product Line
As we learned in Chapter 4, a product line is a group of products or services offered by a specific business. All businesses must decide how many products to offer and how to position its product line. They must also make sure their products make sense together. Would it be appropriate for a fine jewelry store to sell shovels and picks as well as bracelets and earrings? Probably not!
The depth and width of your product line is another important decision. If a bakery decides to offer new types of donuts (maple, jelly and glazed), it’s expanding the depth of its product line. If it branches out to other items (soup, salad and sandwiches), it’s expanding the width of its product line.
Pursuing growth by expanding the width of a product line can be risky, especially for relatively new businesses. New products may require marketing and operational skills beyond your core competencies. It’s wise to revisit your business’s strengths and your long-term market objectives before extending a product line.
Marketing Services
Although we treat services as products throughout this book, they differ in several important ways from consumer goods such as bicycles and baby carriages.
The main difference is that services are often intangible, which can make it harder to judge their quality. If you sell sandwiches, customers know right away whether it’s a good sandwich. But if you’re a house painter or accountant, your services may take days, weeks or months to prove their value. For this reason, references and experience are usually very important when marketing services.
Positioning Your Product
After identifying your target market segments, you must decide how to position your product within each of those segments. This means deciding how to portray it to customers, and how to make it stand out from your competitors’ products.
Look back at your Competitive Analysis Worksheet and think about where you want to position your products. Do you want to offer better quality? Lower prices? Safer ingredients? Faster turnaround time?
To guide your efforts, write a positioning statement for each market segment you target. A positioning statement consists of a couple of sentences describing what you offer that your competitors don’t. Once you explain this clearly, you can use it as the basis for your marketing messages.
Of course, you can’t write an effective positioning statement until you know what your customers’ needs are and how your competitors are meeting them.
Your market research collected raw information about who your customers are, where they live, how much they spend, who else sells to them and why they buy. Now, you must use this information to identify the most compelling reason for customers to do business with you.
Your positioning statement explains how you’ll meet their needs by focusing on the following elements:
Primary target customer. As identified by your market research, these are the people who are most likely to buy.
Product. This is what you’re selling, in the broadest sense. It’s not just your product, but all the services that go along with it.
Key benefit. This is the primary benefit—as perceived by your primary target market—that sets you apart from your competitors.
Differentiator. This is the major factor that makes your key benefit better than your competitors’ and motivates customers to buy.
Here’s an example:
[Your company] has the only [product type] that provides [your target customer] in [your area] with [your key benefit], because unlike [your competitor], [your company] offers [your differentiator].
You may need to talk with your advisors, employees, and current and prospective customers to create your positioning statement. You should also research your competitors’ positioning, if possible; this will help you choose your own strategy.
The Positioning Statement Worksheet will help you write a strong positioning statement. Good positioning doesn’t come easily, so don’t settle on the first or even the second statement you come up with. Keep working at it until you’re completely satisfied. The better you understand your market and your customers, the closer you’ll come to the perfect positioning statement.
…
Professor Calderwood’s advice made a lot of sense to me...especially the part about the fumes. I’d noticed that my people tend to rush things when they were working with ammonia or chlorine. If they weren’t using those heavy-duty chemicals, it seemed logical that they’d take more time and do a better job. And they’d probably be happier, too.
After Brian made a list of every product he used, Alison told him to go to Greenseal.org, where he found a list of GS-37 cleaners and janitorial products. She also gave him a few articles on workplace air quality, employee morale and the effect of seasonal allergies and illnesses on productivity, which would help him to make a solid case for his new techniques.
On a tip from Professor Calderwood, he also looked at how much of each product he needed to use. For instance, if it took two ounces of ammonia to clean a bathroom, compared to four ounces of a citrus-based cleaner, then Brian would only get half as much use out of the citrus-based cleaner.
Some green disinfectants took longer to work, so I also needed to think about how that would affect our overall cleaning time. Would my crew have to slow down, or could they just switch over to another job until the disinfectant had worked? In the end, I figured they could damp-wipe office surfaces while waiting.
For the most part, the new cleaning products cost about the same as the old ones. Our biggest expense was the new vacuums. A 20-gallon wet/dry vac with a top-rated HEPA filter cost about $800 a piece. That was a lot of money, but I felt like it made a big statement about what we’re doing different.
Probably the biggest change was that I had to start being a real salesman. I had to explain how we’re different and why we’re worth the price. I thought that would be a tough job, and it sure was. But not for the reasons I expected.
…
Branding Your Product
A brand is a name or symbol—or some combination of the two—that represents a product. Evian water, the Toyota car, the Bic pen and STP motor oil are familiar examples of brands.
In a larger sense, a brand is everything a business stands for. That includes the name and logo, and the products to which they refer. But it also includes the expectations and emotions that a business evokes in the hearts and minds of consumers, employees and business partners.
Brand Identity
Brand identity is the way you present your business and product to consumers. It includes your features, benefits, logo, packaging, advertising and services.
In order to differentiate your products from all the similar products on the market, you must create a unique brand identity. An established brand associated with a quality product is a very valuable asset.
You don’t have to spend millions of dollars to establish a brand identity. And the best branding strategy in the world can’t make up for a shoddy product or poor service.
Brand Image
Brand image refers to the associations that your brand evokes in consumers’ minds. Remember: Consumers don’t just buy products; they buy a concept of what the product will do for them.
Your brand image should be:
Immediately evoked
Positive
Unique to your brand
Easily identifiable
You can look at it this way: Brand identity is how you want to be seen, while brand image is how you are seen. However and wherever your company interacts with customers—and this of course includes advertising and word of mouth—that is where your brand image is established.
That’s why knowing your company’s personality and values—and by extension, your brand identity—is so important: It gives you the script for the role you must play every time you interact with customers.
Creating Your Brand
Branding means telling the story of your business and your product in a compelling and colorful way—one that will give people reasons to buy your product instead of someone else’s.
In a sense, branding is like running a radio station. If you think of yourself as a transmitter, and your customers as receivers, then branding is like getting your signal through loud and clear, without any static.
Some small businesses make the mistake of thinking they don’t need a branding strategy. The fact is, your business will naturally generate a brand image, whether you want it to or not. We don’t believe that something so important should be left to chance. Or worse yet, to your competitors.
A good way to begin building your brand is to figure out what’s at the core of your business. One possibility is to come up with a list of words that come to mind when you think about your business or your product.
Try to come up with 10 such words off the top of your head. Then, try to narrow them down to one or two words that mean the most to you.
If this doesn’t work for you, try something else. Think of colors, textures, attitudes—anything that strikes a chord with you. What matters is that you pinpoint your strongest, most authentic emotions about what makes your product special. Once you’ve done this, you have something you can try to express to other people.
At the same time, you have to know what your customers want. Your brand identity has to be one that your target customers value, so a big part of building your brand is understanding where customers’ desires and your abilities intersect. It’s not enough to make a promise; the customer has to value it and you have to be able to keep it.
Consider these questions:
What makes people buy a product like yours? Is it a luxury or a necessity?
What motivates your target customers? Are they looking for security? Are they trying to save time?
What features do they value? Will your product’s quality, authenticity, durability, flexibility, or ease of use attract them?
Your product’s brand is also determined by your employees and your premises. What kind of business are you running? What personality do you want your business to project? What message do you want your employees to communicate?
The purpose of asking questions like these is to find those qualities that will instantly mean something to your customers, and make them the core of your brand.
…
Alison and Professor Calderwood said that once I went green, I could charge a little more. Between the health benefits, the new vacuums and the extra time, Alison reckoned I could add about 10 percent to my price.
But once I started researching what other green services were charging, that seemed too low. Companies in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York and Boston were charging about 18 percent more. And unlike me, they had direct competition! I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t charge the same. Or maybe even round it up to 20 percent, since I was the only game in town. Alison said something about how Elizabethtown wasn’t Cincinnati, but I didn’t see that as a big worry. I was ready to get out there and sell.
Although most of the businesses Brian approached seemed interested at first, all but one of them turned him down when they found out what he was charging.
Brian was disappointed, to say the least. But Alison explained to him that “premium price” doesn’t mean you get to charge whatever you want. A premium price can only be as high as the customer’s perception of the product’s value.
When I asked Alison why she hadn’t told me that in the first place, she said, “I did, but it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”
I’d been feeling pretty ticked off, but I couldn’t argue with that. She was right. I’d stopped listening to things I didn’t want to hear. Now, I didn’t have much choice but to go back to the drawing board.
…
Choosing a Brand Name
The first step in establishing a brand is usually taken—often unwittingly—when the owner chooses a business or product name. Your name should be:
Eligible for trademark protection
Easy to spell, remember and pronounce
Different from your competitors
Suggestive of product benefits (e.g., Mr. Clean or Beautyrest mattresses).
In line with your brand identity: Nissan Pathfinder (adventure and excitement); Slurpee (fun snack food for kids).
In line with the scope of your business. If you offer services in Tucson, Arizona, you might want to include “Tucson” in the name. If you sell worldwide, it makes less sense to emphasize your location (unless it’s relevant to your product, like “Tucson Chile Company”).
Also, it shouldn’t limit your options. If your brand name is tied to a specific product—or to your own name—it may complicate things when you wish to grow or sell your business.
Choosing a Logo
A logo is the graphic symbol of your brand. You can choose a logo that reflects or depicts your product, but you don’t have to. Many famous brands have an abstract logo; the Nike “Swoosh” is a classic example.
That said, your logo should fit your type of business. A childcare business might choose pastel or primary colors, and use building blocks, teddy bears or children in its logo. If they used dark colors, and images like skulls or lightning bolts, they’d be sending the wrong message.
A good logo has the following qualities:
Simple and instantly recognizable
Reproduces well in black and white
Looks equally good on business cards, packaging, mailing labels, T-shirts, billboards and mobile screens
Includes your company name
Your logo should be professionally designed, and you should get as many outside opinions on it as possible. Given the importance of your logo, and the length of time you’re likely to have it, this is not an area where it pays to cut corners. If you can reduce your costs through barter or other bootstrapping methods, that’s great. But think twice before settling for a third-rate design. A low-quality logo is no bargain.
Your Branding Statement
Once you’ve thought about what your brand’s promise is, and why your customers will value it, it’s time to write your branding statement. For Green Thumb Plant Care, this might be Green Thumb makes a day at the office like a walk in the park.
Once you come up with a branding statement, make sure it guides everything your company does, so that your brand identity is clear and consistent. Your company logo, colors, packaging, labels, business cards, retail space, service policies, slogans, promotions, employees and website should communicate your brand identity in precisely the same way at all times.
Mission, positioning and branding
Earlier, you came up with a mission statement and a positioning statement. To avoid confusion, let’s take a quick look at the difference between these statements and a branding statement. Your mission statement explains in broad terms what your business hopes to be and do. Your positioning statement explains how and why your specific product meets the needs of a specific type of customer. Your branding statement communicates your brand’s identity in the marketplace.
Packaging Your Product
Because packaging communicates your product’s benefits, position and brand, packaging decisions must be guided by your positioning and branding statements. What brand identity do you want your packaging to communicate? What kind of packaging does your target customer expect?
Attractive packaging can often spell the difference between making or losing a sale. Clever packaging design can also increase sales substantially. Many businesses achieve success by devising new ways to package existing products. By changing the packaging, they reposition the product, hit new customer segments, and even open new channels of distribution.
Packaging isn’t just for consumer products. For a service business, “packaging” might include things like website design, business cards, work uniforms and printed materials such as business cards and invoices. Perhaps most important, it includes the personal appearance and professional behavior of you and your employees. In effect, this is the “wrapper” your services come in.
Your location is also a form of packaging. If you have a retail store in a dingy, dirty part of town, how will this affect customers’ feelings about your product? Dirty windows, broken signs, inadequate lighting—all of these things can make your business seem shoddy or unwelcoming. By contrast, if your business is the only clean, attractive store in the neighborhood, where do you think people will prefer to shop?
Of course, the same goes for your online presence. For instance, a website with jarring fonts and colors and lots of misspellings may not be taken seriously.
Wise packaging choices can also free your business from regulatory oversight, reduce your shipping costs, earn goodwill, and—in the case of biodegradeable or otherwise eco-friendly packaging—improve your competitiveness in international markets.
One of the best things you can do in regards to your packaging is to stay flexible. Things are changing quickly in many industries, and you never know when some inspired new packaging idea will occur to you or someone else. If you can settle on a comparatively simple design with a quick turnaround time, that can be changed or improved with a minimum of expense, you’ll be better positioned to take advantages of new options.
Here are some packaging ideas to consider:
Choose a container that can be used for some other purpose.
Change package shape to decrease package-to-product ratio.
Use recycled or biodegradable materials.
Use soy inks and water-based glues.
Don’t use composite materials that are difficult to recycle (e.g., thermoform blisterpacks).
The Packaging Ideas Worksheet will help you describe your business’s packaging requirements and goals.
…
Looking back, it wasn’t hard to see why my sales pitch failed. I was trying to make things easy, so my pitch was simple: Pay me 20 percent more than you do now, and save the world. All the other stuff about employee health, I never got a chance to explain.
With Alison’s help, Brian revisited his features and benefits, positioning, and branding strategy. He also took a sales class. He practiced his sales pitch again and again, and soon he was ready to give it another try.
This time, he began by explaining that he was switching over to green cleaning supplies, filtered vacuuming and other methods that reduce indoor air pollution. He cited studies that suggested this would have a positive effect on employee health and morale. He talked about local molds and other allergens, which cause absenteeism and low productivity. He pointed out that green cleaning could earn customer goodwill and help to differentiate the business. (Restaurants and medical offices were particularly intrigued by this.)
Once Brian explained the benefits of his service clearly, and showed people the value they could get by paying 10 percent more, the response was good.
A couple of businesses were skeptical that the green chemicals would actually get things clean. But Brian was prepared for that objection, because his suppliers had sent him charts comparing their effectiveness to common brands.
Within six months, Brian had signed contracts with 26 new offices and an elementary school. In order to meet the increased demand, he took out an SBA-backed loan, bought two more trucks and vacuums, and hired four more workers.
I’m proud of what I achieved and I’m looking forward to building up my business throughout the area. But I think the most valuable thing I got from this experience was confidence.
I know now that you can’t just give up when the going gets tough. If you treat adversity as an opportunity to make new connections and learn new things, you’ll end up stronger than ever.
…
Conclusion
Your product strategy begins when you decide what products to offer, based on what your market research has shown you about your customers’ needs and tastes. Next, find ways to make your packaging, warranties, image, and service enhance your product.
After you research your customer and market, committing to a shrewd branding and positioning strategy is one of your best paths for success.

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Positioning Statement Tips State real, lasting benefits. Vague benefits like “great taste,” and variable ones like “low prices,” aren’t adequate. Lots of businesses can legitimately offer “great taste,” and lots of businesses with low prices are forced to raise them. Your positioning statement must get at the heart of your product’s specific value to customers. As a rule of thumb, try putting your competitor’s product name into your positioning statement. If it’s just as accurate, your statement needs more work. Pinpoint your differentiator. Don’t throw terms like “unique” around. Such words don’t mean anything unless there’s a real difference. And if there’s a real difference, you should describe it clearly instead of using buzzwords. In other words, don’t say you’re unique; explain why you’re unique. Keep customers’ needs in mind. If your statement doesn’t give them a strong, obvious reason to buy from you instead of a competitor, go back to the drawing board. Keep it simple! A good positioning statement is easy to understand and remember. Once you’ve found the selling point that matters most to your target market, stick with it. Don’t dilute your message by adding extra details.

| NxLeveL® TECH TIP BUSINESS RESOURCES AND THE WEB
Creating Versatile Logos A professional logo should always be created as a vector file. To understand why this is necessary, you need to know how the two main types of digital images work: Raster images contain lots of tiny colored squares called pixels. The more squares there are per inch, the sharper the image looks. When you enlarge the image too much, it loses its sharpness and becomes blurry. Raster formats include .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .psd, .png and .tiff. If your logo is a raster image, it may look fine online, but it may not be suitable for print and it probably won’t enlarge well. Vector images consist of mathematically defined points, lines, curves and colors. This means that when you blow them up, the clarity of the image remains the same. You can use the same image for a business card or a billboard with no loss of quality. You can also remove the logo from its background and place it on a different background. Vector file formats include .eps and .ai. Vector images can also be saved as PDFs. Again, logos should be created as vector files. If you submit a raster logo to a printer, they may be able to convert it by tracing it, but it will take time and cost money.