New logo wanted for Grand Tourismo

Grand Tourismo

We act as a broker between people who want to rent a RV (camper) and people/businesses that want to rent our their Recreational Vehicle (RV).

Grand Tourismo – rent (or rent out) your RV with us

Going on a holiday with a RV (Recreational Vehicle, Camper) is getting more and more popular almost everywhere, it’s growing in both the US and Europe and also in Sweden where we will try out our concept.
Buying a RV is not a small thing, they are usually quite expensive and when you consider how many days a year you will really use it, it is normally a bad idea to actually own it. Hence the now more and more common rent business.
However, since many people still like to own their vehicle, we thought – why not help them rent it out to others? Everyone make a win out of this, we take a small cut in the middle, and also environmentally this is sound. Think of it as a Airbnb, but with RVs instead of rooms or apartments.

(I’ve highlighted value words for your convenience, and underscored the two in our eyes most important aspects of the brand).

The Grand Tourismo brand is a warm and friendly one, we’re convinced we must succeed in bringing in human values, personality and good old-fashioned service standards into this company to make it prosper. We don’t want to be seen as a cold, smart or sterile internet service but rather as a clever way for families and couples to explore and spend quality time together.

Warm, human, not old fashioned but with the confidence and calm that an old brand with a heritage gets. This last thing is quite important, but also hard to describe and therefore probably a challenge for you all – we don’t want the logo of our brand to look outdated, but we still want it to feel like it’s “been around”. “Style never goes out of fashion” is an old saying, and perhaps this is what we’re looking for. We don’t want to have to change and update the logo in a year or two, so look for a form/color/style language that is contemporary and still classic. Authentic might be a good word to describe what we’re looking for.

The other important aspect of our brand is the core of our offer – you rent a RV on your own terms. Most other rental businesses offer one or a few different kind of vehicles, while we offer all kinds of RV:s (we’re like a broker that match people who want to rent with the one that want to rent out their RV:s). We hope to have RV:s available in all major cities and regions of initially Sweden, and later on, Europe. This is something that’s new in the market. We will allow short rents, long rents and all season rents. We will offer new and more expensive (and luxurious) RV:s, but also older, cheaper and more economical cars. All these choices must be presented in an easy and non-complicated environment, and still be fully available to the visitor of the site (grandtourismo.se or grandtourismo.eu).

Flexibility, big choice and easy to maneuver, that is the core offer of Grand Tourismo. Those values make it easier to act spontaneous, and we want people to take a “Grand Tour” not only during the summer months, but also to visit the October fest of München in the autumn, to go skiing in the Alps in the winter, to make a journey to Granada in the very south of Spain for New Years Eve, to explore the spring in Tuscany and so on.

Grand Tourismo is a tourism brand, not a car brand or a internet brand, but we don’t want it to be a logo with palms and suns.
Target groups? Older couples with lots of time (and money), and families with kids, that’s our two main target groups. People from all over Europe. This brand must be a broad, but not corny or an unsophisticated one.

Also, please consider that to succeed, we must also convince the owners of RV:s to trust us to rent out their vehicles. Therefore, trust is a very important ground value that we must manage to communicate to all stakeholders in this business.

What about form and style? Well, our main tool is a online booking system, and we’d be really happy if you could find a symbol of some kind that can be implemented in the logo, and also be present in the site architecture. An example: say that you design a logo for us where you include the symbol for city center (it’s a circle with a ring around it, an European road sign symbol). This “bullet eye”-symbol could perhaps also be used as a bullet in all the lists of available vehicles in the internet system. That way, we use our logo all over the site, making the experience of using Grand Tourismo more branded. Or perhaps you underline the logo in a certain way, with the possibility of having this specific underlining present on the site to mark “best choice” or “favored RV” or something like that. We hope you get our point, ask otherwise.

Inspiration? We’ve decided not to settle for a certain set of colors in advance, so that is very open. You can se the logo of our holding company (http://www.CapitalStockholm.se), maybe that say’s something about our taste even though the target groups, purpose etc is totally different (of course it’s from a 99designs.com competition ;-)

We do want the option to summarize the logo in a favicon, app symbol etc so please design it in a way that makes this possible.

One possible source of inspiration could be that this business is part of a larger trend, the mesh businesses, or the “collaborative consumption” trend. Lisa Gansky wrote a book about this (called The Mesh), there’s another book called “What’s mine is yours” and example of companies within the field are Zipcar, Thredup, Zopa and many of the bicycle sharing programs present in major cities.

For those of you that want more “philosophy” and thoughts behind the idea of sharing, I recommend that you read what internet guru Kevin Kelly has to say on the subject (link here) http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archi…an_own.php