Brand Renewals

by Tony Spaeth

If you have been reading this Journal for sixteen years, this is the sixteenth year that we have been looking at corporate brands together. Including fourteen new stories this year, we have told 206 branding and rebranding stories. You would think, and I would hope, that we have learned a few things, and could draw some conclusions. Before we close, I’ll get back to that.

As in the past, in the this year’s stories I have separated “have to” rebrandings, mandated by structural change (merger, acquisition or spin-out) from “want to” cases, where rebranding was undertaken in an act of leadership, to help achieve some strategic or behavioral goal. But this year, some of these voluntary rebrandings have come more clearly into focus as primarily functional in their motivating purpose, and only secondarily strategic… undertaken primarily because the old mark just wasn’t very good in its functional utility, and indeed was starting to hurt the business. I’ll call these “ought to” rebrandings.

Let’s begin with four “have to” cases, driven by structural change – two spin-outs, then two mergers.

Spin-outs can be great fun for identity designers (and namers) because the communication goal is so often “Here is a new presence and a new vision,” a goal which especially invites and challenges creativity. A fine example was the $3 billion April, 2006 purchase by Bain Capital of Texas Instrument’s “Sensors and Controls” businesses. The new company, to be led by President and CEO Thomas Wroe Jr., would be “the world’s leading supplier of sensors and controls for a broad range of applications.”

The Plan B strategy, in branding a spin-out, is to have your cake and eat it too – express the new, yet retain as much as legally possible, for as long as can be negotiated, of the old parental brand’s endorsing equity. That’s the strategy followed by Frans van Houten in leading NXP, the spin-out to private investors of Philips Semiconductors from Philips Electronics. Said to be “the largest technology LBO ever,” NXP's focus is on chips for consumer electronics devices; theoretically, its independence makes it easier to sell to such Philips competitors as Sony and Panasonic. CEO van Houten sought a brand that would express the "superior sensory experience" NXP chips would bring to mobile phones, digital TVs and such through its "vibrant media technologies."

Given the opportunity to create an entirely new name, who would deliberately choose three initials… not an abbreviation, mind you, just three relatively random initials? Van Houten and his consultants (Verse Group in New York) chose NXP after a full-blown naming process (master list of 1,500 or so) failed to find a better candidate that was legally available. Naming is that hard, in this Internet era. The next best choice was "Nexperia," the company's best-known product (also a Division name); but NXP was felt to be stronger, especially in Asian markets and as a corporate brand. To explain it, the team invented “Next Experience.” (It helps, too, that NXP resonates with electronics engineers as "N times P..." the start of a Fermi theorem.)

"The logo symbolizes everything NXP stands for” according to Ally Cane, senior creative director at Philips Design in Eindhoven and leader of the design project team. “It's colorful, fresh and dynamic. The N&P on top of the X create two arrows facing inwards - so the N (representing the New) and P (representing Philips) point towards the X, which stands for the sensory experiences that will be enhanced through NXP products." Note the comfort level in these references to the parental Philips, reaffirmed with the transitional tag line “founded by Philips.” (Note, too, the simplicity, elegance and power of the unadorned Philips wordmark.)

When there’s a merger, or an acquisition pretending to be a merger, there are really only three rebranding strategies to choose from… “merger of equals,” “strongest brand, transformed,” or “it’s a whole new ball game.” (A fourth strategy is not, technically speaking, a rebranding: “One brand survives: get over it.”) This year, two major mergers chose the “merger of equals” strategy.

Moving now into the “want to” cases, it’s appropriate to begin with the unbundling of a previous “merger of equals” branding. Only six years ago the merger of Vivendi, Canal+ and Seagram (then principally Universal music and movies) was celebrated by tacking Universal onto Vivendi, thusly:

It was a big next step in the conversion of what was once France’s water company (Compagnie Generale des Eaux) into “a global communications giant.” But in 2006, Chairman and CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy reversed course, announcing that “a new chapter in the history of our Group begins with the adoption of a single name, Vivendi. Vivendi is now in a position to communicate its full potential.” This is little more than an admission that the appended “Universal” – a bland generic word which in this context no longer evokes Hollywood – never stood a chance, compared to the brilliantly distinctive “Vivendi.”

Curiously, Lévy chose as well to redesign the perfectly functional Vivendi wordmark (using the French agency Carré Noir). The raisin-colored result is a considerably softer, perhaps a friendlier Vivendi… but a lesser force. Whiting out “Universal” was a no-brainer… but I have to put this wordmark redesign in the “what was he thinking?” category.

Phoenix is one of several 2006 rebrandings done simply to refresh the corporate image, and perhaps bring it more closely into alignment with a changing business strategy. In 2003, Dona Young rose from the ranks to take command of the then unprofitable and somewhat unfocused investment/insurance firm, and returned it to profitability with a clearer focus on rich people... "affluent and high net worth individuals."

Landor was retained to express and advance this strategy, and resurrected the idea of a bird symbol from the company’s past. It is appealing both for its "Phoenix rising from its ashes" relevance, and for its elegance.

An even subtler visual renewal was commissioned for Intelsat, “earth’s new leader in fixed satellite service,” in part to celebrate its acquisition of its leading competitor PanAmSat. Chief Brand Officer Andrea Fabbri (actual title, Sr. Mgr., Brand Strategy and Marketing Communications) ruled out change of the "brilliant" symbol (designed in 2001 by Addison, and containing an almost hidden ‘i’)... leaving Siegel+Gale’s designers only letterforms, and color, to work with.

In imagery, the all-caps sans-serif wordmark is meant to feel both more important and more contemporary. And functionally, its all-caps linearity and softer gray color help secure the visual lock-up of wordmark to symbol, strengthening the logo's branding utility as a unit. The designer also contributed the evocative brand theme "Closer, by far" and a campaign theme as well... "0 degrees of separation." (Note: all Intelsat satellites are parked over the equator... 0 degrees latitude.)

Joerres was frustrated, however, that the Manpower image would not change as rapidly as its reality. On a director's advice, he made the trip (from Milwaukee) to London to call on Wolff Olins, to talk about the brand. Wolff Olins developed the positioning goal "Thought leader in the new world of work," designed a logo and more importantly, a complete new look and feel for all Manpower media -- print, Web, and all those 4,400 offices. As many as 200 different unit and office identities would be replaced with the new brandmark.

The new logo is a softer, lighter wordmark, lower-cased to be more "approachable," dominated by an abstract symbol of five rounded bars... their meaning said to be "multiple choices, multiple colors." Although the bars seem to spell "mp," they are not meant to be seen as such; Manpower does not particularly want to be known as MP. The new symbol successful in achieving a big change of image, but it’s a bit of a head-scratcher in what it means.

Some strategic rebrandings can best be compared to a Hail Mary pass; this is one of them. Until now, Eastman Kodak made no effort to distinguish its corporate brand from its category brand; both were represented by the familiar yellow box with a red K. Thus the corporate reputation remains stuck in “film and film-based cameras,” a category we all know to be challenged by digital technologies.

How can the Kodak brand gain more traction in new categories, as it must? Step one is to make visible the broader institutional Kodak that can parent digital as well as film-based businesses. That is exactly what the mark that CEO Anthony Perez unveiled January 6, 2000 was designed (with help from Ogilvy’s BIG unit) to achieve: “This introduction is the latest step in the company's broad brand transformation effort, which reflects the multi-industry, digital imaging leader Kodak has become." If it looks a little more like (say) Sony’s mark or Canon’s, so be it.

In some high-profile rebrandings, the driving strategy is to re-balance the relationships between parts and the whole, usually in the direction of imposing a stronger corporate umbrella brand. This is often done in phases, to help assure transition of brand equities. Here are two cases, one that shows a transitional phase and the other, a final phase.

AFK Sistema is Russia's largest non-natural-resources corporation, and 80% of it is a collection of some 50 communications companies with little tradition of collaboration and no sense of 'family.' To manage them more efficiently, in 1998 AFK created the Sistema Telecom subsidiary, but until now it has remained effectively invisible in the marketplace.

In 2001, Sergei Shchebetov (MBA Stanford '94) joined AFK to head planning. He built a clearer strategic vision of a coherent multi-product telecommunication group leveraging common leadership, technology and communications platforms, and the determination to make it happen. In April 2005 he was assigned to Sistema Telecom as First Deputy General Director, launched a rebranding initiative, and in January 2006 he assumed control as General Director and CEO.

In August 2005, Shchebetov chose Wolff Olins to help him express, or rather to implement, his vision through branding. A new identity would be imposed on the four principal companies that he would use to redefine the corporation's composition... MTS (in Cyrillic MTC) in cellular, MGTS in wired lines, the internet provider Stream, and Comstar in alternative technologies like fiberoptics. This is said, by its makers, to be Russia's first umbrella branding exercise, and it is a particularly clear and dramatic one. Appropriately it's anchored with an egg, a friendly symbol of birth and potential. (And in Russia, I'm told, eggs can also connote leadership. Think Fabergé.)

Using solid squares, one for the common egg and the second for a unit name, Wolff Olins designed a graphic identity strong enough to tolerate color coding of the units without compromising the family brand. For marketing applications, the designers are promoting aggressive and playful uses of eggs both as a window for graphics, and as three dimensional objects.

Shchebetov summarizes his intent: "Our new brand symbolizes unity, reliability and trust. It represents perfection, novelty and expectation of a miracle. And most importantly it means potential -- the potential of our companies, our experts, the Group as a whole. In practice, the uniform brand is called not only to unite the companies inside the Group, but also to present us to the market in a new fashion."

In 1997, Credit Suisse had made its transitional move (toward monolithic branding), when Chairman Rainer Gut led what I then called "a controlled and brilliantly executed corporate-branding exercise" to establish Credit Suisse as a modern global masterbrand while retaining its valuable First Boston investment banking equity. “Credit Suisse” then came to the forefront, in bright blue and red, while prime component First Boston dropped to a clearly subsidiary role.

Then last year, Chairman Oswald Grübel approved the next and final step to monolithic branding. This could have been done simply by dropping "First Boston." Instead, Grübel chose to rebrand completely again, by changing to a post-modern logo (designed in the London office of Enterprise IG) that nods to the pre-1997 First Boston ship symbol… a wordmark pulled by two foresails. “First Boston” is now a visual memory, vested in those sails.

A disadvantage of umbrella branding is that it creates dependency. What do you do, then, if the parts become more valuable than the whole? How do you reverse course? Twenty years ago a proud industrial conglomerate called Rockwell International began a long process of dissolution, spinning out spun out such companies as Rocketdyne, Conexant and Meritor. Then in June of 2001, it took the last step, split itself in two and disappeared, leaving Rockwell Automation and Rockwell Collins as independent, unrelated successor companies.

Despite the risk of sharing a name (and in this case a logo too), whose meaning neither could any longer fully control, for the time being both companies took the easy route of retaining their inherited and comfortable divisional signatures… as if they still shared the Rockwell International umbrella.

Five years later, Rockwell Collins is on solid ground -- an international leader in avionics (since the 30s, the Collins brand has dominated aviation radios). CEO Clayton Jones felt the time had come for a higher, more assertive profile, a posture of pride and more confident self determination. While he was not yet prepared to wean the company completely of “Rockwell,” he could at least create and own his own Rockwell.

The creative brief, then, to consultants BrandLogic: Retain both Rockwell and Collins, but replace implied "division" with "proud corporation;" position the corporation as a leader in innovation, and strengthen its internal unity with a "one company" presence. BrandLogic’s designers answered with a sharply italic stacked wordmark that uses the double l's, accented with three red-orange dashes, to change two personal names into one dynamic corporate presence.

The extreme case of “share a name, change the logo” comes from India, and it is a story of biblical proportions. The legendary Dhirubai Ambani, who died in 2002, was said to be the world's greatest businessman. Starting with textiles, he built India's premiere corporation (sales of $23 billion), with leadership positions in energy, communications, finance and more, all under the Reliance brand. And with his wife and partner Kokilaben, he raised two sons, Mukesh and the younger Anil, to share and inherit his leadership. Instead, like Cain and Abel they waged a bitter and public war for power.

Ultimately their mother helped broker a peace of sorts. Reliance Group would be divided. Mukesh would continue to lead the Group and its $16 billion Reliance Industries -- the core oil, chemicals and textile businesses. But companies in four sectors (coal-based energy, gas-based energy, financial services and communications) would be "demerged" to Anil.

Neither brother, however, would concede the Reliance name and its ‘flame’ symbol. So they glossed this over, agreeing that in existing businesses they would share the brand, while in new categories whoever got there first could own it. (One imagines that both brothers are now furiously starting little ventures in every imaginable category, to stake their claim.)

Although he was entitled to keep the flame symbol, Anil recognized the opportunity and the need to express a new Reliance presence, and he retained Landor Associates to design it. According to Landor, "the client considered a variety of preliminary naming ideas such as 'Reliance1,' but decided on Reliance ADAG, thus leveraging the power of his own name, while also retaining the full heritage and equity of the Reliance name. Landor was then challenged to express a new dynamic, confident and contemporary Reliance ADAG in a simple and bold manner in order to stand out within the Indian landscape. "

The design outcome: a lock-up of Reliance with the rest of the company name, featuring a central AA device called "the Reliance Apex" (but undeniably, a personal monogram).

At launch, Mr. Ambani explained blue and red as the colors of integrity, confidence, energy and passion, and the lower-case characters as signals of accessibility and openness. But that’s PR-speak. His leadership intention is more fundamental: "to integrate the multitude of businesses under one work culture," and the logo’s intended message is "a change in the way we relate to ourselves, to the world, and to one another... not as individuals with limited roles and responsibilities, but as members of one team, one family, one collectivity."

Will it work? The logo is an adequate band-aid, but as for the name decision itself, I’m doubtful. As a practical matter, people will almost certainly continue to use "Reliance" to designate Reliance Industries, so in many situations they must invent a different way to designate this other Reliance, which thus in effect has lost control of its own communicative name. And in principle, it's never a good idea to share a name with a company whose performance and behavior one cannot control.

Finally, let’s consider two “ought to” rebrandings which, although linked at launch to strategic messages, were initially driven by technical needs; the old logos, quite simply, were poor in functionality

The 1969 Intel logo, I must confess, has long been on my Sleeping Beauty list, awaiting a prince's kiss. 'Funky' described it best -- distinctive, certainly, but kind of awkward. Its cherished internal meaning, "INTegrated ELectronics," had little external relevance. Worst of all, because the dropped-e logo could not be used to convey Intel's ingredient-brand message in an appealing way on third-party products, "Intel inside" had been created, thus setting up an unstable and dilutive two-logo branding situation.

There’s a strategic story, too. Both to communicate the market promise of shift in purpose (essentially, from PC-focused chips to market-facing chip/software 'platforms') and to establish himself as the worthy heir to the legendary Andy Grove, new CEO Paul Otellini knew he must not only change the strategic paradigm -- he must communicate the change with impact and credibility. But Otellini also knew the communication challenge would be significant, perhaps beyond Intel's experience. So a year ago, he hired Samsung's marketing star Eric Kim and made him a direct report... an outsider who (as reported in Business Week) "could play bad cop and push through unpopular changes when necessary." On October 20, Kim indeed played bad cop: he told the leadership team that to put impact and credibility behind the new positioning (and implicitly, the new leadership), the 37-year-old "dropped-e" logo must go, along with the "intel inside" marketing badge.

To replace both marks, FutureBrand designed a wordmark-in-a-swoosh, a variation of the Intel Inside swoosh, relocating its notch to anchor a “Leap Ahead” tagline. It's a balancing act, intended to express meaningful change yet retain the equity of a stable and trusted company, and it does this nicely.

Finally we have Cisco, in my mind the best rebranding event of 2006. It began with a technical, design-driven rethinking of the existing logo, then gained traction as senior managers began to link it to positioning changes and marketing opportunities.

Cisco’s brand officer Gary McCavitt had long struggled with the design of the bridge-in-a-box logo, a mark difficult to use, difficult to put on products, and dated in personality. He retained designer Joe Finocchiaro to explore alternatives, and Joe generously proposed adding corporate brand designer Jerry Kuyper to the team. CEO John Chambers approved the design initiative, imposing one condition: "the DNA of our bridge must be retained."

Shorter being better, and "Systems" being limiting as well as backward-facing, the team soon recommended name truncation. Joe and Jerry then ditched the bridge-in a-box idea in favor of a more integral symbol-enhanced wordmark, putting the emphasis on the brand's greatest asset, the “Cisco” name. The new mark, strong and simple, can be used to brand the many little Cisco products Cisco hopes you will be carrying on your person in future years, where old “Cisco Systems” and its bridge-in-a-dark box could not effectively function.

There you have it. Fourteen more corporate branding stories from 2006… and over sixteen years, 206 tales of leadership through branding. What have we learned?

Quite a lot, actually. From studying these cases, we have learned that we can define any institutional rebranding quite precisely in terms both of its business purposes, and the communication goals chosen to achieve them. To be more specific, I believe there are thirteen kinds of purpose for rebranding (call them the ‘drivers’). Because some drivers can be fulfilled with a choice of strategies, I have found a total of twenty-two communication goals commonly associated with these thirteen driving purposes, as follows:

This ‘menu’ of goals and drivers can be used by anyone contemplating an institutional rebranding, for any one purpose, as a checklist of additional considerations. “If we are going to think about changing our brand in any way, what are all the issues and opportunities we should consider? Who, therefore, needs to be part of the process, and what kinds of expertise will we want to engage?”

Obviously, this menu can also be used as a framework for collecting data on successful rebrandings, and thus for learning from these histories. Of the many tools and tactics available to modify a corporate brand, which have been effectively used, most often, to achieve any given goal or mix of goals? And does this vary by industry, or by nation… or indeed, by consultant and design firm?

With a consultant partner, Tom Vanderbauwhede of the Belgian branding firm Lemento, I have begun this data-collection process, and in next year’s article in this Journal I hope we can report what we can all learn from it. In the meantime, Journal readers can keep track of our progress, and second-guess our data entries, at www.corporatebrandmatrix.com.