Logo testing: How to find the best logo for your brand

Whether you’re launching a new business or rebranding an existing one, selecting the right logo is one of the most important branding decisions you’ll make. Don’t leave such an important decision up to chance. See what works and what doesn’t by performing logo testing.

Logo testing places different logos in front of a share of your target market and asks them for feedback on your designs. It allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your options and measure specific metrics, like the appeal or uniqueness of each design.

Logo testing allows you to learn about good logo design and pinpoint cool logo ideas, empowering you to pick one that you’re confident will be successful. 

A good logo is a top brand differentiator, which is why large companies consistently invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in their designs. Whatever your budget is, it’s important to test your logo ideas with a focus group or a survey before you launch them, since even the most expensive designs can miss their mark.

Logo testing helps you enter the next stage of the design process with 4 major advantages:

Now that you know why it’s important to evaluate your logo ideas before coming to a decision, you’re ready to start testing them. Here are the 4 key steps you’ll want to adopt: 

Related: A look at why concept testing is important

Pick the stimuli you want to test

While you can test any logo you want, it’s best to choose stimuli that you’re already confident in based on positive reactions from coworkers or other people who’ve seen the design. To avoid skewing your results, choose designs that are in a similar stage of development. If you’re testing a finished logo against one that you’re still working on, you already know which one will win.

To make logo testing more manageable for you and your respondents, it’s best to keep the number of stimuli low. The maximum number of stimuli you should select changes based on whether you decide on implementing a monadic or a sequential monadic survey design.

A monadic survey design divides up your respondent pool and presents each respondent with a single stimulus. When you’ve gathered enough feedback on each stimulus, you can pick a winning design by comparing the feedback across stimuli.

Here’s an example of a logo test with a monadic design.

This design lets you to ask more questions on each stimulus. Also, it results in a shorter questionnaire, which keeps respondents from going through your survey quickly and it benefits your completion rate. However, as you’re only showing individual respondents a single stimulus, you’ll need to target a larger audience. This can prove costly and it might not be feasible.

A sequential monadic survey design presents each respondent with multiple stimuli. After you’ve received your responses, you can directly compare your stimuli against one another.

Here’s how a sequential monadic logo test can appear.

This type of design allows you to survey a relatively smaller audience than a monadic design, which makes it more practical. But if you want to limit the length of your survey, you won’t get to ask as many questions about each stimulus.

Read more about the benefits and drawbacks of each design, as well as how to perform each in SurveyMonkey.

What makes a good logo design? The metrics you measure will help you decide.

Your questions can be as specific as you’d like. If you want to know whether your logo idea stands out, for example, you might ask about its visibility and aesthetics. In general, here are the top metrics to consider:

The utility of each metric depends on your goals. If you want a logo that will really drive sales, purchase intent may be the most important. If your main goal is to differentiate your brand, you should place more importance on the uniqueness of its design.

You can measure any metric in your logo testing survey using a Likert scale. The Likert scale is simple and intuitive for respondents, offers consistent choices, and makes it easy for you to analyze results. Your questions can follow the formula, “How (metric) is the logo?” where your answer options go from “Extremely (metric)” to “Not at all (metric).”

For instance, here’s how the question might appear when our metric is uniqueness:

How unique is the logo?

Sometimes, when you present respondents with multiple stimuli, they react similarly to each stimulus. To ensure your survey results are still useful, it’s often a good idea to make respondents choose their favorite logo with a forced-answer question at the end of the survey. This question will also help you rank the importance of each metric to the overall likeability of the logo.

Your survey might also include screener, category, and demographic questions that tell you more about the people you’re collecting feedback from and let you segment your results by group. Learn about each of these questions in our robust guide for concept testing.

The only way to determine the real appeal of your logo ideas is to have your target audience take a look at them. There are 2 ways to get feedback from your target market:

After you’ve gathered responses, you’re set to compare your logo ideas. To help you narrow in on the data you value most and to make your analysis easier, we suggest you use Top 2 Box scores in your survey analysis. Top 2 Box scores makes it easy to compare logos across metrics and identify the overall winner.

Remember to also review the responses from your open-ended questions (those that don’t include answer choices). A word cloud lets you pinpoint the top takeaways from each logo.

There’s a whole more that goes into testing your logos. Take a deeper dive on concept testing with brand names by reading the “The ultimate guide to concept testing.”

Logo testing belongs to the development, growth, and saturation stages of the product life cycle, when you’re either developing your brand or rebranding your business to go in a new direction.

During the development stage, you’ll probably be looking for high-level input that’ll help you make significant decisions about the aesthetic of your brand. This is the time to ask respondents to choose between several totally different logos, for example. Because your brand is new, it’s the best time to gather directional feedback on your logo.

During the growth and saturation stages, you’ll probably be looking for more nuanced feedback on your logo. This is the time to ask respondents focused questions about the logos’ colors, fonts, and themes. It’s also the time to think about sampling your loyal customer base, just to make sure they’re on board with your rebranding efforts.

As you test your logo ideas, make sure you keep an eye on these 5 things:

Great job! Now you know why logo testing is so important, have learned how to run your own test, and you’ve got some tricks up your sleeve to ensure your tests run smoothly. Now it’s time to find a logo that can differentiate your product and help your brand stand out.