Xerox Logo Rebranding

This week marks a biggie for rebranding aficionados, with the redesign of the Xerox corporate logo. There is already a lot out there on the topic, so I won’t totally reinvent the wheel.

Xerox’s perspective on the Logo Rebranding

“There has been a perception gap in the marketplace,” said Richard Wergan, vice president of worldwide brand marketing and advertising. “Xerox is still perceived incorrectly as a copier company. We do not make copiers.”

Wergan would not say how much the research for the new logo cost, but said it was a “significant multimillion-dollar marketing investment.”

From the Official Press Release:

The new Xerox logo is now a lowercase treatment of the Xerox name - in a vibrant red - alongside a sphere-shaped symbol sketched with lines that link to form an illustrative “X,” representing Xerox’s connections to its customers, partners, industry and innovation, and designed to be more effectively animated for use in multi-media platforms.

“Our brand is one of our most prized assets and the value it brings to our business is immeasurable,” added Ursula M. Burns, president, Xerox. “Our customers, our employees and our shareholders connect the most with what the brand stands for — quality, innovation, customer-focus and a values-rich culture. Today, we’re strengthening all our attributes and giving our brand a contemporary look that is more relevant for business today - a bit less formal, a lot more lively with links to our heritage and a nod to the future.”

From Business Week:

Making the Brand More Approachable

Designed in the 1960s by branding firm, Chermayeff & Geismar, the familiar block-capital-letter XEROX wordmark, most often seen around the world in red, did not lend itself to the three-dimensional world of Internet and mobile-phone marketing canvases. The new logo, created in FS Albert font, is accompanied by a symbol—a red sphere that is trying to convey a sense of the globe. The intersecting graphic ribbons encircling the sphere signify the worldwide connections between Xerox’s customers, employees, and other stakeholders. The new wordmark, with softened and rounded lower-case letters, is a far cry from the former imposing logo hatched in an era when U.S. Steel and IBM were kings of the corporate mountains.

The new graphic identity of the company is meant to make Xerox a more approachable brand without compromising its reputation for engineering. In fact, an internal document circulated between Interbrand and Xerox describes the new graphic font this way: “I am FS Albert. I am a modern and approachable font. My rounded corners make me more human and less technical.” The sphere symbol will be especially used on the Internet and will spin in other animated applications, says Maryanne Stump, Interbrand’s senior director of brand strategy. “The old Xerox logo and graphics just didn’t lend themselves to the new media landscape.”

During 18 months of research preceding this week’s launch, customers already made strong connections between the brand and attributes such as “dependable, traditional, and established.” The company’s challenge will be to reinforce those while improving impressions of the other characteristics, which currently separate Xerox from its rivals in a negative way.

Xerox, despite the ubiquity of its brand, operates at a brand-building disadvantage to rivals like Canon, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba in that those brands have strong consumer franchises to buttress their business-to-business images. “The research shows that this gives our competitors an advantage in communicating innovation and modernity,” says Wergan.

The Business Week article goes on to talk about Xerox’s blunder in allowing Microsoft and Apple to swipe their forerunning ideas to our modern day personal computing. I found this somewhat ironic as the first thing I likened the new logo to, was the Xbox logo, a sub-brand waving under Microsoft’s banner.

Here’s a comparison:

My Thoughts:Anyway, I pretty much agree with what has been stated. The Xerox brand was overdue for an overhaul. The type was very old school/corporate, with less than ideal all cap readability. The switch takes the font from a thick and thin sans to a thicker sans with a darker toned red. I do like the type selection, FS Albert font, which has an organic playfulness to it that was desperately needed to liven up the corporate message.

Visually, the type maintains its consistency with each character equi-distant from baseline to cap line; but it’s certainly more readable now. The all lowercase definitely does bring about a more modern trend and the gradation on the ball definitely makes this web 2.0 or business 2.0, whatever you want to call it. I’m not a fan of gradation logo elements, but overall this logo is a notable improvement.

The design firm said, “The sphere symbol will be especially used on the Internet and will spin in other animated application.” Hmmm, spinning, gotta wonder about that…