idea > logic > magic

I recently came across the following article by Brendan Sinclair the editor of newsletter SitePoint Tribune, at www.sitepoint.com

Sahar Sarid, owner of the blog Conceptualist.com, posted a logo contest in the SitePoint Contests last week with a prize value of $2,500.

But here’s the thing – he’s not really buying a logo. He’s buying a story. Sahar says so himself: ‘Each logo must include a description of how you came up with it, what went through your mind when designing it. I want a story to go with it. I want to understand the small elements that make it powerful…’

By offering $2,500 for a logo, Sahar’s created a story about the contest itself, and generated a buzz that attracts far more than the usual number of submissions. He’s also creating a story for the future of the logo: ‘This is the logo I paid $2,500 for in SitePoint Contests.’ And of course, Sahar has attracted a ton of SitePoint members to his web site.

What fantastic value Sahar’s getting for his money. And you thought it was just a logo contest! I’m not saying that Sahar has anything other than a logo design in mind. What I am saying is that the approach we take to achieving our goals can generate significant benefits – that may be unusual or unexpected – for us.

A beautiful story indeed. And in my opinion, the innovation here lies purely in someone realizing that there are marketing opportunities to be explored beyond the obvious – he simply targeted a specific community of designers in a well-publicized forum, effectively leveraged their solid existing network infrastructure, generated huge traffic to his site and successfully created a hype around something that would  ordinarily be a simple agency design brief.

I believe that if you just keep looking beyond the mundane, you’ll find the magic…