QUESTION:
Are the logos on your website copyrighted? We are looking for a logo for the church I attend and found one on the site we really like. Is it something we can use?
- Jaime :: Wisconsin

ANSWER
You may absolutely not use the logos highlighted on Church Relevance’s top church logos list. Here is why:

1. Copyright Law (indicates authorship/creation)
   The logos are copyrighted and using them is illegal. Copyright gives the creator of an original work certain exclusive rights on the usage of the work. Logo designers have federal copyright as soon as the logo is created. The logo does not need a copyright notice or to be registered.
2. Trademark Law (indicates origin)
   The logos are trademarked at varying degrees and using them is illegal. A trademark gives its owner exclusive rights to a specific name, symbol, logo, or combination of these items.
3. It misrepresents you.
   Your logo should communicate one or a few unique qualities about your church. Copying another church’s logo is almost certainly like pursuing another church’s unique calling. There is a good chance you would misrepresent yourself or at least not reach your full branding potential.
4. It misrepresents the other church.
   If you copy another church’s logo, you dilute their brand by associating your church brand with their logo. It also risks confusion, which may, particularly on the Internet, blend the two churches’ true identities or messages.

Ideally, a church should have its own custom logo. Good custom branding can be a powerful thing.

Of course, legally using a high quality premade logo does not mean your church will fail. In fact, I have seen many successful church sub-ministries share a logo. Oneighty (Tulsa, OK) used to franchise their youth ministry brand (e.g., FL, KS, TN, WI).

The key is to have a high quality logo that reflects your brand and is used with consistency throughout your church communications.

As a disclaimer, I am not an expert so please do not take my opinion or any opinions in the comments as legal advice.

For Discussion:
- Did I miss anything?
- What do you think about using another church’s logo?

Ben from Mexico, Missouri!

To determine who won the 2 free tickets to the Desiring God Conference, I used the random integers generator. It chose #875.

Ben from Mexico, Missouri chose #865 which made him the winner!

Congrats, Ben! Simply reply to the email I sent you to accept your winnings.

At the end of the month, I will road trip to Dallas, TX to live blog the Innovation3 Conference (January 27-28). There will be almost 100 speakers discussing innovation within a 26 hour time span. To learn more or to register for the conference, visit Innovation3Gathering.com.

And if you are going to be there, post a comment and hopefully we can meet in person.

:: UPDATE :: Comments are closed, and a winner has been chosen.

Want 2 free tickets to this year’s Desiring God Conference?

It takes place in Minneapolis, MN on February 2-4, 2009. This year, the Desiring God Conference features thoughts on evangelism from:

• Matt Chandler :: The Village Church (Highland Village, TX)
• Mark Dever :: Capitol Hill Baptist Church (Washington, DC)
• Michael Oh :: Christ Bible Seminary (Japan)
• John Piper :: Bethlehem Baptist Church (Minneapolis, MN)

HOW TO GET FREE TICKETS

Tony Morgan and Carlos Whittaker already gave away free tickets on their blogs. And I have 2 more free tickets to give away.

To win them, simply choose a number between 1 and 1,000 and post your number in the comment section. On Friday, I will announce a winner whose number is closest to the number determined by a random integers generator.  Guidelines are:

• Only guess a number if the free tickets will be used if you win them.
• You must include a valid email address in the comment section’s email field.
• If someone posts twice, I will only accept the first number he posts.
• If two people post the same number, the winner is the person who posted first.
• If two numbers are equidistant from the randomly generated number, the “overbid” will be thrown out.

Guess away!

This morning I have the privilege of giving a creative marketing lecture at Oklahoma State University (Tulsa, OK). Here are a few thoughts from my talk.

WHAT IS CREATIVE MARKETING?

Typically, people think of advertising whenever they think of creative marketing. They think of Nike, Apple, and Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s Burger King ads. Reality is creative marketing is so much more.

WHAT IS MARKETING?

Marketing has four main areas, and you can be creative in all of them.

1. Promotion
   (i.e., advertising, direct marketing, interactive, personal selling, public relations, sales promotion)
   Example: Crispin Porter + Bogusky
2. Product (service)
   Example: Ideo
3. Price
   Example: Psychological Pricing
4. Place (distribution)
   Examples: Envirosell & UPS

Using these four marketing areas, your four-step goal is to create:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Desire
4. Action

WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

Creativity is about ideas and concepts. You are a product of what your mind digests. If you want to be creative, fill your mind and surround yourself with a broad scope of excellence. Here is what the experts say:

When we remember something, that memory feels unified, but the reality is that you assemble each memory out of lots of different pieces. A tip-of-the-tongue state occurs when one of the pieces gets lost.
- Daniel Schacter :: Psychologist :: Harvard

When you need to tie together things that are distantly related, that’s exactly what an insight is. It’s tying together information that people already know, but they don’t recognize how they are related until that key moment.
- Mark Jung-Beeman :: Neuroscientist :: Northwestern University

Problem solving, whether creative or methodical, doesn’t begin from scratch when a person starts to work on a problem. His or her pre-existing brain-state biases a person to use a creative or a methodical strategy.
- John Kounios :: Psychology Professor :: Drexel University

New insights come from new people and new environments — any circumstance in which the brain has a hard time predicting what will happen next.
- Fast Company

Breakthrough insights are at the intersection of ideas, concepts, and cultures.
- Frans Johansson :: The Medici Effect

3 STEPS TO EFFECTIVE CREATIVE MARKETING

Creativity for creativity’s sake is worthless. Creative marketing must be effective and preferably efficient. Here are three essential steps:

1. Know your brand.
   What makes you unique? What is your mission? What are your core values? etc.
2. Understand culture.
   Understand the cultures of the people you want to reach and how those cultures are evolving.
3. Determine the best marketing route.
   There are hundreds of ways to connect your brand with your audience, but you need to determine which one will be most effective.

JUST THE BEGINNING

There is so much more research and best practices on each area that I have briefly discussed. If you are serious about being a creative marketer, deepen your studies and practice it.

In 2008, Guy Kawasaki created a website called Alltop that aggregates the latest content from the world’s top websites and organizes them by topic.

It is a good idea turned great idea. In fact, Alltop’s church page has grown into a phenomenal resource that lists about 100 church related blogs worth reading.

Since Alltop lists the 5 most recent posts for each website, the church page gives you about 500 posts from a wide scope of church leaders, influencers, and practitioners. And if that is not enough, you could also start reading the Christianity page, the religion page, or another one of Alltop’s hundreds of topics.