The brand I am analyzing is that of a company I have followed for a few years and have used their products and services. The company is called SUMO or SUMOME (Sumo Me). They got started with a site called AppSumo. The entire premise behind AppSumo was to promote deals from other people and help drive business to your site. Sumo started out of the AppSumo site. Sumo.com now sells the tools that they developed for AppSumo.com that helped them drive their business.
Here are the links to their social media sites:
https://www.youtube.com/sumome
https://www.facebook.com/appsumo
What are the brand weaknesses?
This brand has a very simple logo that really has nothing to do with what most people would consider the word Sumo to be. It is a simple monochromatic blue gradient crown on a white background. The AppSumo logo is much better in that it is a Sumo Wrestler graphic with the company name and slogan below it. One of the biggest weaknesses I see with them is that they do not create original content most of the type, but they do pull together other content and explain it and promote it as their own in a lot of cases. The other big issue I see with this brand is that they have their brand divided between two completely different marketing strategies.
](https://mrbconsulting.biz/storage/app/media/sumo.png)
Logo for https://sumo.com
Logo used by AppSumo on Social Media sites
Logo uses on Facebook Banner for AppSumo
The simple design is meant to keep the focus the content and not about them. They are all about the content is king philosophy. Trying very hard to be the go to people to help your business be successful. By promoting products and tools to that end and it does not matter what the product or tool is, if they believe is will help promote their deals and in turn help you and drive traffic to your site, they will promote it. They promote the entrepreneurs and focus on them.
How has the design used
From what I can determine as the most used features are this. They look at the overall composition of each post separately and not a cohesive composition of the company. There is not repeatable elements from post to post. Each image as the post image does a very good job of using contrast, complementary colors etc to create catching graphics. They do not use many real people or things in their graphics. They are all created specifically for their articles.
Their logos are centered on every image file due to the simplistic design of them. The AppSumo logo uses the top 2/3rds of the image for the sumo wrestler and the bottom 1/3rd for the text. This is the only logo I have seen that uses that. The Facebook page for AppSumo does use a very simplistic grid for the banner and puts the face from the sumo wrestler in a circle on the left side of the banner with the title and tag line using the right 2/3 of the banner. This image is the only other image that I have seen used. The Sumo Facebook page does not have any graphics in the banner area, just text that is dead center in the banner.
Logo used on the Facebook Banner for AppSumo divided by Rule of thirds
What metrics will be used to determine if the brand is successful?
This brand is all about metrics and promotes a lot of products that help track metrics. The Sumo.com site metrics is based upon how many paying memberships they have for the products that they sell. Each membership is on a yearly subscription basis. The AppSumo part of the business is tracked by how many people have signed up for their deals e-mail each day and how many people actually buy the deals. They do claim to have a greater than 5% are buying a deal at least once a month. They have an estimated 2 million e-mail subscribers. That means for every 100,000 subscribers they have more than 5,000 buying the deal. That is 50,000 for every 1 million people that get a deal in their e-mail. This is one of the best buying rates for any e-mail marketing list that you will ever find.