A day of rest/Some thoughts about marketing.

 
Good afternoon everybody.
I am sitting on my couch. I spent the night last night playing some music with a potential new band, and then following up by recording for my good friend Ben Bitzel's album. It was super good to be back on the drums last night, and I felt like I was rocking and rolling on a level that I haven't been at in a while. I was (wait for it) playing like an animal.

 
(Rock!)
While I am sitting around at home, I am thinking about marketing. Our youth group just bought an ad for the high school musical, and so our church's communication director and I have been working hard to design it. I struggle with marketing, because I spend so much time preaching and giving messages in 20-40 minute blocks, and marketing is all about summing that all up in a photograph. It is hard for me.

 
This is our youth ministry's logo. Actually, it has a tremendous amount of meaning, because each of the three arrows stands for one part of our mission statement (more on this later?). I also think it just looks really good, it's clean, it's simple to understand, it holds up both in color and in black and white. While I'm thinking through it, I thought I'd post some of my favorite logos and marketing schemes in recent years.

 
Apple Computers (Link)
Ok, I'm a little biased. I love Apple. I think their computers are the bomb diggity (yeah, I just did that to the English language). But beyond that, they've had a logo that has been more or less unchanged since their start in the 70s. They've done a really good job of modernizing it without ditching what works for them. 
 
 
Mars Hill Church, Michigan (Link)
Again, probably a little biased because of my love for Rob Bell. But this logo is as simple as could possibly be, and I'm not sure but I think their logo (like the Veritas logo) is based upon their mission or purpose statement. I'm very impressed by logos that can be clean and simple and yet convay a ton of information if you know where you're looking for. 

 
Google (Link)
This has nothing to do with kissing up to the company that owns my blog. Honestly, at first I really didn't like the Google logo, but it's started to grow on me a little bit. It would appear (based on the three logos I've picked) that I'm also a little partial to that shinny effect everyone's using these days.
Here's the point though. I'm starting to think that logos are more important to young people than they've ever been before. There was a point in time that people could make the arguement that it really didn't matter, but I think those days are gone. So to those of us who are in youth ministry, how important is our ministry's logo? How important is our marketing campaign. I know we all hate it, but perhaps it's time to start picking up on it. 
PS: I'm going to start labeling my posts, so people can find parts of the blog quicker. Yeah!
Godspeed,
-J-

 

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