Tony Spaeth analyzes notable corporate identity programs from 2000. He summarizes programs from BP Amoco, ExxonMobil, Pharmacia, Worldcom, Sensient Technologies (formerly Universal Foods), Ingersoll-Rand, and Syngenta. The identity programs reflected mergers, spin-offs, rebrandings and repositionings. Spaeth evaluates the strategic and creative aspects of the identity work, and what they reveal about corporate leadership.

1. Tony Spaeth
Identity
6 Kirby Lane North
Rye, NY 10580
914 967 6018
www.identityworks.com
2000
“Sign Language” is Tony Spaeth’s eleventh annual
report on noteworthy corporate identity programs.
Programs are chosen for their strategic interest and
creative excellence, but more importantly as
lessons in leadership.
Reprinted with permission of
ACROSS THE BOARD
The Conference Board magazine
March / April 2001

2. Tony Spaeth is an independent identity consultant.
He specializes in corporate positioning, diagnosis
of corporate and brand identity needs, clarification
of strategic vision through identity, and nomenclature systems and name development. Prior to establishing his own practice, Spaeth was a consulting
principal of the identity firm Anspach Grossman
Portugal (now Enterprise IG) and directed its
naming activities. He is a graduate of Princeton and
received his Masters in Business Administration
from Harvard.
Tony teams with graphic designers and agencies to
provide total identity services. Recent clients
include Sony Corporation, State Street, Dow Jones,
Flowserve Corporation with Jack Summerford, and
Orbital Sciences, Footstar and Celera Genomics
with Nat Connacher.
This “2000” article, as well as “1999,”
“1998,” “1997”and “1995/1996,” can be viewed
or downloaded at www.identityworks.com.

3. “Sign Language”
The best of last year’s new logos
spoke volumes about corporate leaders.
By Tony Spaeth
C
losing out the 20th century, we’ve picked
14 new corporate brands worth noting for
their creative excellence and strategic interest.
Some reflect a reconfiguration of the corporation—
a merger, a spin-out, a split (like the Andersens), or
just a rearrangement of parts (MCI Worldcom)—
while others are straightforward, managementinitiated rebrandings that reposition and renew the
corporate brand. All, however, reveal a great deal
about the presence and effectiveness of corporate
leadership in shaping the corporate brand.
“The Amoco is silent.” Indeed, shareholders are
expected to vote “Amoco” out of the company’s
name at April’s annual meeting.
Early on, group chief executive John Browne
T
he historic (largest-ever) merger of British
Petroleum and Amoco (formerly Standard Oil
Indiana) took effect Dec. 31,
TONY SPAETH, a Rye, N.Y., corpo- 1998, creating “BP Amoco.” But
rate brand consultant, reports
you won’t find a BP Amoco
here each year on noteworthy
logo; as some American
identity programs. Additional
employees joked at the time,
reviews and reflections can be
decided that perpetuating two names would be
a poor foundation for a global power brand.
Another goal would be to lose the “P” heritage,
as in Petroleum. Worldwide branding firm Landor
seen at www.identityworks.com.
A
C R O S S
T H E
B
O A R D
M
A R C H
/ A
P R I L
2 0 0 1
4 5

4. Associates was retained to reposition this
giant firm and to rebrand its thousands of retail
locations.
A strategy so bold deserved an exciting
execution and got it in the August brand launch.
BP’s distinctive green-yellow colors survived and
were transformed into a flowery burst of sun
and earth and energy. It’s a brilliant platform for
promises of lower emissions, solar power, and
the tagline “Beyond Petroleum.”
A
t the end of 1999, Exxon acquired Mobil to
set the newer “largest-ever industrial merger”
record, upstaging BP Amoco. (In heritage
terms, that’s Standard Oil of New Jersey buying
Standard Oil of New York.) CEO Lee Raymond
chose the alternative branding strategy: combining the two names in a merely corporate
brand while retaining two independent retail
identities (plus Esso), as if to say, “Aren’t two
global powerbrands better than one?” Well,
yes, for a while, anyway, but the product is
an invisible commodity. Ultimately, economics
favor integration, and a “Who’s kidding who?”
attitude prevails.
A corporate-only change like this is a lot
less costly, and faster, than retail redesign.
The downside: ExxonMobil won’t get the benefit that BP will reap from fresh new stations.
ExxonMobil took three months to organize its
identity team, and three more to pick worldwide consultants Lippincott & Margulies, who
designed the mark and new system in four
months. The mark is calibrated to coexist as
a parent to the retail brands, using the Exxon
x’s and the lowercase Mobil letterforms. As
Raymond put it, “We think the look and feel
of it reflect our company’s chief attributes—the
combined strengths and synergies of the former
Exxon and Mobil.”
Executionally, it’s nice work, yet strategically
it’s a work in process, to be resolved someday
in a brand that looks more clearly to the future
than to its own past. As with DaimlerChrysler,
it’s a two-proud-companies message serving only
the momentary need to “sell” a merger (or to
sell an acquisition as a merger).
4 6
M
A R C H
/ A
P R I L
2 0 0 1
A
C R O S S
I
n the Pharmacia and Worldcom programs,
2000 gave us two illustrations of a possible
(indeed common) next step in the merger
process, which is to lose one of the two heritage
names. First, remember Pharmacia & Upjohn
and its Stone Age rock symbol? Erected by a
previous CEO, the esoteric rock had come to
symbolize the clash of cultures in a troubled
merger and was called “the Upjohn tombstone”
by the American contingent, who found the
purple rock a little on the weird side.
Following Pharmacia’s March 2000 merger
with Monsanto, CEO Fred Hassan took advantage of the opportunity to jettison the purple
rock and, with some regret, “Upjohn” as well,
in order to focus on the simple, globally
declarative (indeed preemptive) “Pharmacia”
name. The design solution, credited to Chicago’s
Crosby Associates but actually suggested by
Monsanto’s Bob Shapiro, is deliberately conservative. Hassan was comfortable returning
to the reserved corporate personality of a mainstream player and was focused on instantly
aligning the Searle/Monsanto and Swedish
Pharmacia cultures. As a result, the logo borrows its purplish-blue color and its one-legged
“A” from Monsanto’s Searle logo, and the
cultures are as one. That’s a neat act of leadership through design.
F
ollow the bouncing star. Two years ago,
on the occasion of Worldcom’s 1998 acquisition of MCI, I noted that “the possibly unintended
message created by swiveling and extending
MCI’s ‘starburst’ over the Worldcom adjunct is
that MCI has acquired Worldcom, which, in
motion to the right, may be trying to escape. . . .
By so clearly combining two still distinct brands,
this logo will always point to their separate pasts
T H E
B
O A R D

5. rather than their unified future. Draining both
brands of their prior equity, it is the opposite
of a powerbrand.”
In 1999, the business fundamentals came
into alignment with the identity fundamentals.
As in the previous case, one of the two heritage
names was lost when, in mid-April, “MCI” quietly
disappeared from the corporate name, and the
star shifted one more letter to the right. (In the
process, it lost another little piece of its design
integrity, its dotting-the-i function.)
And as the bottom dropped out of long-distance profits, in November CEO Bernard J.
Ebbers announced Worldcom’s reconfiguration
as two tracking stocks, to be called separately
Worldcom and MCI. So what’s next? Will we
see a brand-new MCI logo? Or a revival of
the 1996 starmark (designed by Interbrand)
and, in that event, a new Worldcom logo?
Or just two loose stars, headed in opposite
directions?
F
or sheer drama, the rebirth of Universal
Foods as Sensient Technologies, an imaginative act of corporate leadership on the part of
CEO Kenneth Manning, takes this year’s honors.
Like IR’s Henkel, Manning was stuck with a
largely obsolete image—in this case, the image
of a commodity-food company that had instead
become a leading supplier of flavors, fragrances,
and colors for such applications as cosmetics,
pharmaceuticals, and even inkjet inks, as well
as foods and beverages.
The direction Manning provided to consulting
firm Corporate Branding was, “Get us out of
food, into technology, and make us gigantically
visible.” He chose the evocative name “Sensient”
and a straightforward wordmark embellished
with a swoosh-like wave, a good example of
design that manages to be distinctively creative
without trying too hard.
A
lmost always, branding consultants (myself
included) oppose the use of initials to replace
outdated names—initials familiar to insiders but
meaningless to the outside world, and expensive
to “seat” without big budgets and millions of exposures. But the case for this particular change is
strong. It helps that Ingersoll-Rand’s audiences are
industrial, easily reached at minimal expense.
The problem with a famous name like
Ingersoll-Rand can be that everyone knows what
it is, but they’re wrong. IR has become a highly
diversified industrial-products company whose
reputation remains limited to construction equipment. As newly arrived (from Textron) CEO
Herbert Henkel put it: “We haven’t done a good
job of getting the word out . . . we still have the
image of being the rock-drill company.”
For the time being, the corporate name is
unchanged, while IR aggressively rebrands its
many products and businesses. “We want IR
on everything,” Henkel said. Design credit goes
to the New York firm DMCD, which obviously
believes in initials. The logo is direct and strong,
easy to work with, and only as original as it
needs to be.
A
C R O S S
S
yngenta is the vehicle in which the pharmaceutical giants Novartis and AstraZeneca
have vested their agribusiness units, charged
“to deliver better food to a better world through
extensive crop solutions.”
Chairman Heinz Imhof and CEO Michael
Pragnell jointly chaired the identity steering
committee and retained the Zurich-based consultants Interbrand Zintzmeyer & Lux (whose
Frankfurt office developed the name). Their
goal, no doubt shared by the parent companies,
was that this spin-out have “a clear personality
of its own,” a goal clearly achieved in the
new Syngenta mark.
The name itself, not the first choice but the
best available (and functionally superb), is a
T H E
B
O A R D
M
A R C H
/ A
P R I L
2 0 0 1
4 7

6. mixed blessing. The company says it means
“bringing people together”—“syn” reflects
synergy and synthesis, while “gens” means
people. But to be blunt, most of us will more
quickly see “synthetic” and “genetic,” meanings
politically charged, although absolutely relevant
to this company’s true identity.
From this perspective, the design strategy—
an embellished wordmark, rather than a symbol—is especially well-advised. Our attention
is focused on the name itself, not distracted
by a separate symbol, but the leaf makes the
name fresh and “green,” neatly overpowering
its verbal risks. The client team rejected the
option of a symbol (preferred by the designers)
and are to be commended for it.
Note, as well, the relative restraint and simplicity of the Syngenta logo. Like Sensient’s, it is
no more distinctive than it needs to be.
H
oward Hughes lives? In one of the more
curious transformations of the year 2000,
Hughes chairman and CEO Michael T. Smith
converted the company’s 1998 space-age swoosh
into a logo—complete with a “speedline”—more
appropriate to a 1950s industrial company.
Identity change is a powerful weapon, to be
handled with care. Sometimes it’s better to keep
it in the holster.
The Hughes communications goal was clear
enough. Having sold its defense-electronics
businesses to Raytheon, its auto electronics back
to General Motors, and its satellite manufacturing
to Boeing, “Hughes is now a pure-play digitalcommunications company,” Smith said, “and we
want the world to know about it.” That is an
assignment for an advertising campaign, not necessarily for a logo change, especially when the
1998 logo (cliché or not) is more consistent with
the desired message than the industrial-weight
2000 logo (designed by GlobalWorks, a multicultural Website-design agency).
logo. Indeed, Covisint says, “We don’t have a
symbol; we have a tool.”
It’s a logo-design strategy uniquely appropriate for this cooperative venture of Ford, General
Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Nissan, and Renault,
created to build a common b-to-b exchange
portal for the auto companies. It says, in effect:
“Our customers, their brands, and their products
are the heroes of the Covisint identity; we’re
just the process that connects them with one
another.” And that’s literally what the logo/tool
does. (“We call it the Connector.”) It is shown
above as a corporate mark, but in other configurations, it links itself as a sub-brand to one of
its founding partners, or links products to applications, and so on.
And Covisint hasn’t yet named a CEO, so
credit for this unusually creative branding decision goes to a multicompany-venture team,
led (in its communications planning) by Ford
Motor Co.’s Alice Miles. When Landor Associates
showed five Covisint design ideas, the team
focused instantly on the Connector for its
ingenuity message, as well as its connection
message.
The name “Covisint,” incidentally, was generated by the inside Miles team, who were fortunate to find something combining collaboration,
vision, and integrated solutions.
T
he rebranding of Nationwide gives us
another design (like Covisint’s) more conceptual than graphic, a tool as well as a symbol.
Three years ago, seeing tectonic shifts in
the financial-services industry and the rise of
“brand” in the world at large, chairman and
CEO Dimon McFerson commanded a sweeping
review of the Nationwide brand: “Don’t rule
I
f you go to www.covisint.com, you have
to look carefully to find the company’s symbol, a design device that links one element to
another. This is the year’s most unconventional
4 8
M
A R C H
/ A
P R I L
2 0 0 1
A
C R O S S
T H E
B
O A R D

7. out eagles, but go wherever it takes us.” With
Interbrand’s assistance, the branding team
designed the logo to be far more approachable,
emphasizing a worldwide partnership with the
customer in a broader range of relationships.
The bird would indeed vanish, for it was redundant, domineering, chauvinistic, and suggestive
of a postal service or an airline (indeed, it’s
remarkably like American Airlines’ eagle).
Among other options, Interbrand offered
the “frame” concept. McFerson’s team knew it
was unconventional, subject to criticism if not
ridicule, yet so appropriate it might serve for
another 45 or 50 years. Most often it will be
seen superimposed on a photograph, framing
a customer. But whether addressed to customers,
brokers, agents, or employees, the message is:
“Intentionally, our identity leaves something
open to your imagination. It’s our hope that you
will put yourself in the picture.”
L
ast August, the world’s largest consulting
firm and the world’s largest accounting firm
bitterly parted company. Andersen Consulting,
denied further use of its name, would become
Accenture. But that’s another story.
While negotiation and arbitration played out
under the leadership of worldwide managing
partner Jim Wadia, Arthur Andersen’s partners
had three years to prepare for the separation.
Wadia’s task included reinvention of the venerable firm’s image, if only to fill the gap left by
the consultancy’s departure. As marketing manager
Suzanne Gylfe put it: “Our brand was known
for professionalism, security, stability, and intelligence, but we now needed to portray speed,
success, and an ability to navigate through the
new economy.” In Wadia’s words, “Our ability
to become a leader in the new economy
depends on . . . the enthusiasm with which each
of us lives our brand.”
Wadia’s executive committee worked for a
year and a half with the consulting firm Enterprise IG. Given a range of symbolic options,
they chose the boldest: a bright orange-red
sphere, to be understood not as a static graphicdesign element but as a dynamic concept. (The
A
C R O S S
news release said, “Arthur Andersen’s new visual
identity . . . represents the organization’s enduring integrity, inventiveness, and global ‘one-firm’
approach.”)
Unfortunately, you are most likely to see the
orange ball and orange-and-red Arthur Andersen
wordmark in static print advertising, where it’s
just another orange ball whose relevance is not
immediately evident. To appreciate the designers’
intended “bold, inventive, and maverick spirit,”
you have to visit www.arthurandersen.com and
see the sphere floating in unexpected places.
Incidentally, the orange sphere’s designer, Will
Ayers, commented on the trend toward replacement of the flat symbols of classic modernism with
modeled or shaded three-dimensional symbols.
(See Nationwide [above] and 3Com [below]; another
example is the replacement of the Saul Bassdesigned AT&T symbol, known affectionately to
insiders as the Death Star, with a shaded-ball version.) Ayers believes that logo design, previously
driven by old-media limitations like poor newspaper reproduction, is today more often driven by
new-media possibilities, which sounds about right.
T
ech company 3Com, too, has moved from
a classic 2-D design to a hipper 3-D idea.
In a “radical strategic transformation” (as chairman
Eric Benhamou put it), 3Com sold the Palm business, the core of its identity, and felt the need to
reinvent itself as a brand rather than a technologyfocused company. CEO Bruce Claflin led the
rebranding effort in this spirit: “When you are
hoping to create something new and important,
you must have the courage to fully commit yourself and the entire business to the transformation.”
The Interbrand consultants’ research led them
to articulate this guiding brand idea: “Where
remarkable things happen effortlessly.” This in
turn led to the design idea of three connected
rings—the third being connected wirelessly, if that
is not too subtle a thought. (Although 3Com calls
them “rings,” Interbrand prefers to call them “circles.” But why fight it? “Three-ring circus” is a
wonderful expression of abundant creative energy, and a net positive.) Claflin reported: “The new
logo has created a lot of buzz and curiosity, and
that’s just what we had in mind.”
T H E
B
O A R D
M
A R C H
/ A
P R I L
2 0 0 1
4 9

8. T
P
reparing for the merger of Bell Atlantic with
GTE Corp., Charles R. Lee and Ivan Seidenberg, who would together share the new company’s CEO title, agreed to seek a new name.
That’s never an easy decision, but the alternatives—Bell Atlantic, or GTE, or mixed together
like “General Bell Atlantic Tel”—looked worse.
The new company would be more global in its
ambitions, and this was an opportunity to escape
the “Atlantic” boundaries as well as the “Plain
Old Telephone Company” image.
Although it sounded strange at first, “Verizon”
is an excellent, distinctive name—one with nice
associations and that is easy to pronounce everywhere. It was picked from names considered in
1996 (when Bell Atlantic acquired Nynex but
decided to keep its name), but not before three
identity firms got involved, and the new master
list grew to 8,000 candidates.
Regrettably, the Verizon logo is less than
excellent. Simplicity is a cardinal rule in logo
design: There shall be only one graphic device,
one gimmick, one dingbat. Verizon has two, and
because the V and Z elements compete with one
another with no visible logic, the logo is cluttered
and clumsy. There are technical design flaws,
too, that make it difficult to work with; for example, in reverse, the red letterforms against black
are so much less visible than the white letters
that one first sees veri on.
How can a Fortune 50 company brand itself
with mediocre design? Could it be a combination
of changing horses in midstream and too many
cooks? Verizon reports that design credit “for original design concept” goes to Landor, which was
retained for identity design, and assigns credit for
“logo refinement and application design” to
DeSola Group, a New York-based consultancy
retained for implementation. Landor confirms its
design of the V concept and a simple wordmark.
DeSola confirms that it added the red Z to the
wordmark, in the belief that Landor’s work lacked
impact (as in, “not enough red”). So, quite naturally, the V and Z could be expected to express conflicting design esthetics, and they do.
One can’t help wondering whether top management’s responsibility for this outcome fell
between the two co-leaders’ stools.
5 0
M
A R C H
/ A
P R I L
2 0 0 1
A
C R O S S
T H E
o end on a more positive note, consider
the rebranding achieved for a Verizon
competitor, France Télécom, by CEO Michel
Bon. The goal: accelerate conversion of a
government-owned, domestic-fixed-line telephone monopoly, expressed so well in the former logo (designed in pre-Internet 1990), into
a global, fast-moving, customer-driven communications competitor.
An early decision in the two-year process
was to stay with the France Télécom name.
“If we changed our name, we would put ourselves on exactly the same level as any other
start-up in the field of telecommunications,
and there are so many,” said Marie-Claude
Peyrache, group VP of corporate communications. So rebranding would rely on design.
The ampersand, or “et” logo (three swooshes!),
clearly changes the brand. It is a graceful yet
powerful symbol, adding style and vigor to
the enterprise. I am not sure “et” speaks to
relationships, as Landor’s Paris office intended
(“you and me, France Télécom and its customers”) so much as it suggests an unlimited
sense of possibilities. The feeling that the
orange “com” is one touch too cute is a mere
quibble.
Although the corporate-identity profession
has been a predominantly American invention,
it often seems that European CEOs (like Michel
Bon) make better clients, more personally
engaged and more respectful of the process.
Time, budget, and commitment were no problem
at France Télécom; 800 employees, for example,
were brought in to be trained in the meaning
of the new identity and the objectives of the
change. The cost? Including offices, telephone
booths, and the vehicle fleet, “30 million euros,
in two years,” Peyrache said. But in perspective,
that is “less than 5 percent of our total advertising
investment for one year.”
FROM BT TO FRANCE TÉLÉCOM and points in
between, the best of these programs prove
again that for a leader seeking significant institutional change, nothing can offer a bigger bang
for the buck than strategically sound, creatively
excellent rebranding. ♦
B
O A R D