Listen to part of a lecture in a business class. So as part of their marketing plan, most companies have a logo. And by logo I mean a symbol or a picture. You know, something the company can use in all its advertisements and product packaging, a visual image meant to reflect the company's goals and values. A logo can help identify a company in people's minds and help sell its products. However, when a logo is ineffective, it can actually hurt a company's sales. So what makes a logo ineffective? Well, one way a logo can be ineffective is if it makes people think of something negative about a company's product. A logo can actually make people think of something that contradicts the product's supposed benefits. So for example, there's this company that sells toothpaste that had a logo with an image that had really dark, muddy colors on the toothpaste box. But we all know that people buy toothpaste to make their teeth clean and bright. Well, with the dark colors in the logo. Consumers didn't think about the toothpaste this way. The dark colors in the logo seemed to contradict the toothpastes ability to make their teeth white and bright, and so people saw the toothpaste in a negative light. So while the company had that logo, the toothpaste didn't sell very well. Another problem with logos. Another way a logo can be ineffective is if it presents an out of date image of the company. So the logo makes people think that the company's product or service isn't keeping pace with changing trends and is therefore outdated. This can sometimes be very damaging to a company's image. For example, a certain telecommunications company, a company that provides telephone and internet service, had a drawing of a telephone as part of its logo. The problem is, telephones have changed a lot over recent years, and the telephone in the logo was the old fashioned type like your parents probably used when they were young. This old style of telephone in the logo gave the impression that the company was not staying up to date with technology, and its sales started to fall because this was a very bad image for a high tech telecommunications company.