The Forty-Five Minute Hostage Situation
I once watched a room full of grown adults spend forty-five minutes arguing about a shade of blue.
Forty-five minutes.
Not healthcare. Not the economy. Not anything with actual stakes.
Blue.
Was it navy? Midnight? Slate? Trustworthy? Sophisticated? Did it feel approachable enough? Too approachable? Not approachable in the right way?
Y'all. I sat there and watched what can only be described as a hostage negotiation between fully employed professionals and a color wheel.
And I couldn't help but wonder — when exactly did we decide our logo was responsible for doing all the heavy lifting?
Business owners love their logos. I get it. A logo feels real. You can see it. Put it on a shirt. Debate it endlessly in a conference room while someone refills the coffee.
What a logo cannot do — not ever, not once in the history of business — is create trust.
That's your job. A human job. Not a design job.
Nobody wraps around the Chick-fil-A drive-thru because of a cartoon chicken. Nobody slaps a Nike swoosh on their kid's backpack because of the font. Those logos represent trust that was earned a thousand times over before the logo ever got involved.
A logo is a shortcut to a reputation you already built. That's it.
And yet. I have watched companies spend months — months — perfecting a logo while their customer experience is out here completely unsupervised.
The phone isn't answered. The website hasn't been touched since 2019. Nobody followed up on the proposal. The email sat in someone's inbox for two weeks.
But the blue? The blue is perfect.
Here's the truth: customers don't fall in love with logos. They fall in love with how you made them feel. The logo just shows up at the end and takes all the credit.
Kind of like the attractive friend who barely touched the group project but somehow gets an A and everyone's grateful they came.
For the record — we do logos. We love logos. A great logo is a beautiful thing. We just refuse to hand you one without making sure the rest of the house is in order first.
Because a great logo deserves a great reputation to stand behind it.
And that's the part we really care about getting right.
Good Grit helps businesses build brands that actually earn the logo. Let's talk.
