Caitlin, Trinity, Nicole
Professor Ting Zhou
DMD 1102
25 March 2020
In the article The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design, Marty Neumeier states “A brand is not a logo.” This was an important element to read while working on our redesign of the Dog Lane Cafe logo because it helped us remember that we should start from scratch. The brand of Dog Lane Cafe is not its current logo. Therefore, their logo can be changed and edited to become something our group thought would fit better and represent Dog Lane Cafe better too. Marty Neumeier also says that branding is a “Gut feeling because people are emotional, intuitive beings.” After creating logo sketches in the beginning, we looked over all of the options everyone came up with and chose the examples we thought potential clients would personally relate to the most. We finalized those designs to present to the class where we listened to the thoughts and “gut feelings” of our peers and ultimately combined the two of our original designs that people seemed to like the most. From there, with the feedback from our peers, we were able to continue and further refine it through critiques to finally conclude our branding design.
Neumeier stated in his article that “The main purpose of branding is to get more people to buy more stuff for more years at a higher price.” While Dog Lane Cafe has only been in business for a little bit over 5 years, it continues to serve its customers, especially at higher prices due to the close proximity near UConn’s Storrs campus and knowing that they will continually have customers because of this. Since UConn will constantly have people surrounding the campus, either through undergraduates, parents/relatives, or alum visiting, Dog Lane Cafe will certainly stay in business because of this. Thus, the need for Dog Lane Cafe to have an impactful brand for themselves is crucial for not only the restaurant itself but for future and current customers. While rebranding and designing the establishment’s brand, we had to keep these factors in mind when creating anything for them. Essentially, our group wanted to re-brand Dog Lane to make it more recognizable to the public. We went towards the more family-friendly/comfortable approach to our interpretation of the brand since Dog Lane Cafe’s target audience and customers are generally college students (mainly UConn students), their families/relatives, other visitors, and people living near the Storrs area.
Another aspect that was significant from the text was when Neumeier mentioned how the problem for most companies is when they separate “strategy from creativity”. Many ill-planned companies tend to focus more on the strategy, rather than the creativity and create an imbalance or gap between the two. Neumeier stresses the importance of a charismatic brand- “any product,
service, or organization for which people believe there’s no substitute”. Before starting this project we had to strategize what we wanted our redesign to look like and how we were going to work together to make this project successful. We made sure to implement both strategy and creativity within our work by learning more about Dog Lane Cafe, such as what their aesthetic was and how we can make it “different”. We noticed that they wanted to achieve a family-friendly vibe and that they desired to put an emphasis on the food aspect of the company, not just the “cafe” portion. Therefore our final design consisted of a cartoon dog to appeal to both families (especially children) and UConn college students because of the husky mascot. Not only will a cartoon dog draw attention to families and children, but it will likewise bring a sense of familiarity with UConn students as well. A fork and knife were also added instead of a coffee cup to acknowledge that Dog Lane is a sit-down food place, not a place for studying. By gathering this information beforehand we were able to overcome that common problem that companies face by researching and utilizing our design skills to best suit them.
