What makes a good B2B logo?

Most logo briefs start with a feeling. “We want something more modern.” “Something that feels premium.” “Not blue, everyone’s blue.”

They’re fair instincts, but they’re not a brief. A logo has a job to do, and in B2B that job is quite specific.

What a logo has to do in B2B

Be recognised, quickly, wherever it turns up.

B2B logos live in places nobody designs for: the corner of a proposal, an email signature, a supplier portal, a tiny square next to a LinkedIn comment, the side of a van, a lanyard at a trade show. It often makes the first impression before anyone has read a word. It has to be recognisable in all of those places, often at the size of a fingernail.

What it doesn’t have to do is explain your business. That’s the job of everything around it: your positioning, your website, your sales material. A logo that tries to show every service you offer usually ends up showing none of them clearly.

Five things a good one gets right

Simple, relevant, timeless, versatile and memorable.

• Simple. Recognisable at a glance. No motto, no acronym, no extra icon squeezed in. If it needs explaining, it’s doing too much.
• Relevant. Right for the people you sell to, not just the people in the room. A supply chain recruiter and a software start-up shouldn’t feel the same.
• Timeless. Built to outlast whatever style is everywhere this year. Strip it back to what’s essential and it’ll last longer.
• Versatile. Works in one colour, reversed out, on a dark photo and at 16 pixels wide. Test it small before you fall in love with it big.
• Memorable. The one that matters most, and the result of getting the other four right.

Where logos go wrong

Most of the problems start before anyone opens a design file.

• Designed by committee. Everyone gets a say, nobody makes the decision, and the result is the average of everyone’s taste.
• Chosen on a white slide. It looks great on its own. Then it goes on the website next to stock photos and a different font, and falls apart.
• Trying to say everything. A cog for engineering, a globe for international, a tick for quality. Buyers see clutter, not meaning.
• Designed before the strategy. With no agreed positioning, there’s nothing to judge it against, so it gets judged on whether people like it.

Your logo doesn’t have to do all the work

The logo is what people recognise. The brand is what they trust.

People expect a lot from a logo. It’s the most visible decision in a brand project, so it gets the most emotion. Leadership teams want it to say who they are, where they’ve come from and where they’re going, all in one mark. So it gets more complicated, because it’s being used as a form of expression.

As long as it’s clean, simple and easy to scale, the logo has done its job. The rest is down to the brand around it.

Trust comes from familiarity. Psychologists call it the mere exposure effect: we tend to feel more positive about things we’ve seen before. Your logo is what people see every time they come across you, so over time it becomes a shortcut to everything they’ve experienced with you. The trust comes from those experiences. The logo just helps people recognise where they had them.

And B2B businesses aren’t Coca-Cola. A global consumer brand can put a detailed, decorative logo in front of millions of people every day, so it becomes familiar however intricate it is. Your buyers might see yours a handful of times a year, in the corner of a proposal, in an inbox, on a phone screen. That’s why simple beats clever. It has to be recognised quickly, in small spaces, by people who aren’t looking for it.

So spend less energy on what the logo expresses and more on how usable it is on every platform you’ll put it on. Then put the real investment into long-term brand building: a clear position, a consistent system around the logo, and doing what you say you’ll do. That’s why we don’t take on logo-only projects. If the logo is changing, it has to be part of a bigger picture.

An example from a real project

One business, three divisions, one system.

Bis Henderson is a supply chain recruiter with three divisions: executive search, permanent and interim. Each one talks to a different buyer with a different problem. Rather than three unrelated logos, we designed a master logo with a sub-logo for each division, and an asset style (route lines, map pins and diamond-shaped photo frames) that runs through all of them. Each division can sound like itself and still look like part of the same business.

The logo worked because the thinking came first. We knew who each division was talking to before anyone drew anything.

How we design logos

The thinking comes first, then you see it in the real world.

Every logo package we do starts with a Look and Feel workshop built on your strategy, so the design has something to be judged against. We develop the narrative and strapline, then present the logo with its assets and a homepage snippet, so you see how it lives on a real page rather than on a white slide. Packages start at £2,755 + VAT. See the brand identity packages.