FICO

New:  Communicative name, logo and visual system

Launched:  March 10, 2009

Story in brief:
"March 10, 2009:  In the interest of clarity and consistency, Fair Isaac Corporation today announced that it has officially adopted the brand FICO as its corporate identity."  This corporate renaming qualifies both as adoption of initials, and elevation of a product brand to the corporate level.

What, or who, is a Fair Isaac? A nice guy, in the credit rating business? As a name, it scores at the top in "whimsical,"  if not positively cuddly. Turns out, however, that there were two guys, Bill Fair and Earl Isaac, who in 1956 founded "Fair, Isaac and Company"  (whence the initials FICO).  The comma got lost in 2003, when the legal name Fair Isaac Corporation was adopted. But "Simply removing the comma changed nothing," says Chief marketing Officer Laurent Pacalin; "journalists would still talk about Fair Isaac as 'the guy who did FICO'."

And what is a FICO? Fair Isaac's principal product is the "FICO Score," a credit worthiness number carried by virtually every American, and the leading measure of consumer credit risk in the U.S.  It is a number thus central to both crisis and recovery.

In February 2007, when Dr. Mark Greene became Fair Isaac's CEO , Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) was about to pull the plug on risky subprime mortgages — step one, in hindsight, in the financial crisis. As the year played out, Greene saw Fair Isaac and FICO Scores, the messengers of credit risk, unfairly (or just confusedly) blamed for lenders' misuse of FICO's perfectly good data. He sensed that softness in the brand itself was possibly a contributing factor. Early in 2008 Brett Wickens, an experienced brand designer (then with MetaDesign, already working with FICO) participated in consideration of a rebranding and actual design of a new logo, but the project was "back-burnered" (costly in crisis and, quite likely, unfocused as yet in purpose.)

Then in April 2008, Laurent Pacalin came on board as Chief Marketing Officer, bringing with him the conviction that brand clarification was critically needed. "I brought the idea of simplifying the brand" and refreshingly, he says "I take full responsibility for what we have done, including shortcomings; the shift from Fair Isaac to FICO was something I instigated, designed and executed with my team."

I will let Pacalin introduce himself.  "By trade I am an engineer, with a lot of time in sales and product, and always interested very much in the esthetics of business. I love design. My wife is an architect, and I happened to have friends in design; perhaps you knew Saul Bass and Herb Yager. I was able to spend a good deal of time with Saul when he was alive, and over the last twenty years I have often thought about what a brand means in terms of corporate values and business strategy. " [Note: can we clone this guy?]

Pacalin quickly gained management and board support for brand renewal with a clear focus on FICO, and then restarted the design conversation with Brett Wickens (now at Ammunition,  industrial designer Robert Brunner's firm).  Wickens (and designer Jeremy Matthews) provided a range of FICO logo explorations, upper and lower case and with/without symbols. "We spent a lot of time on that issue" says Pacalin "and we landed on the simplest possible treatment –  type, color, everything. In an industry in crisis, people have been looking for a beacon of stability and trust and FICO, now as a name and a brand, carries that trust very well."

(The communicative name is now FICO, but for cost and timing reasons, the legal name remains for now Fair Isaac Corporation.)

In a sharp departure from 'best practices,' Pacalin sought no additional budget for the launch, which was "as peaceful as we could make it; a non-event, not a change but a natural conclusion, a shift of emphasis. Media advertising would not be the best use of our money; our choice was to alert media and others one by one, and with a news release."  So this was a low profile launch, perhaps...

But with a big result.  In just two months "Our stock has risen 80%, and analysts say the brand renewal was certainly a cause. They said that, not me; I would not make that leap " says Pacalin.  But in a time of crisis, "It was very well received. It is serving its purpose as a source of energy internally as well as externally."

Credits:
C.E.O. - Mark Greene
C.M.O. - Laurent Pacalin
Identity design - Ammunition; Creative director Brett Wickens,
designer Jeremy Matthews

Greene launches the new brand to customers at InterACT 2009 conference,
next year to be named FICO World 2010

First Impressions:
Strategy:  Solid acts of leadership, at both top and staff levels. If there's a quibble, it's "why not go all the way" ... change the corporate name too, maybe even treat FICO in text as Fico, a real name, no longer an acronym... but that will come in time.
Design:  Excellent. Because it is unadorned (no sparkles, no gradients, no distracting "look at me"s)  it exudes confidence and authority. The closely tucked C-O relationship gives it just enough play to say "designed!" More in-depth design benefits are to be seen in the visual system increasingly evident at www.fico.com. 

Corporate Brand Matrix ratings:  
0% structural,  65% strategic,  35% functional