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2009

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At Fair Isaac Corporation's annual customer conference (March 10, 2009), CEO Mark Greene announced the adoption of the initials FICO (which are also the name of its principal product, the FICO Scores that measure American consumers' creditworthiness), as the company's new communicative name. (The legal name, for the time being, will not change.) Greene also revealed a new FICO logo, a simple and sturdy all-type wordmark designed (by a San Francisco-based industrial design firm named Ammunition) to express the solid strength and authority of FICO's financial information products.  

When Laurent Pacalin joined Fair Isaac as Chief Marketing Officer in April 2008, he was already certain the branding required simplification and a refocusing on its principle asset, the FICO acronym familiar to many Americans. The Fair Isaac name lacked dignity and presence and was not an asset; few were aware of the name, and even fewer knew it to be the last names if the two founders, William Fair and Earl Isaac. The logo, too, was hardly a source of strength -- it featured a star-shaped "saddleback" symbol respected internally for its mathematical meaning (the graph point where positive and negative forces are in balance), a meaning however that had no resonance for outside audiences. 

Functional issues of both name and design weakness, therefore, were real. But they were outweighed by strategic concerns -- issues of awareness, image and confidence. FICO's core business, the quantification of consumer creditworthiness for use by lenders, puts FICO at the center both of financial crisis and of recovery. The weakness and confusion in its branding translated too easily to softness and doubt in the company's image, if not in the company itself.  No one was questioning the legitimacy of the FICO Scores that too many lenders had misused or ignored, yet Fair Isaac was too often seen as part of the crisis instead of as the firm, trustworthy centerpoint of recovery. 

The strategic drivers of the rebranding, therefore, were to replace a soft and unserious image with one of solid strength and authority; to renew employee confidence and refocus loyalties toward the global whole, and then to elevate FICO's corporate visibility to outside audiences.

In addition to the new FICO logo, Ammunition's designers provided a visual system including graphic devices, secondary typography and a color palette. The rebranding also set in motion a process of realignment of products (and in some cases product names) under the FICO brand, transitioning toward a monolithic signature system. (Thus Falcon Fraud Manager will become FICO Fraud Manager, and Collection & Recovery has become FICO Debt Manager).

Sensitive to the crisis environment, Greene and Pacalin chose to launch FICO as "peacefully" as possible, as a non-event (a shift of emphasis, not a change), thus with no media advertising, indeed no incremental budget. B2B customers, analysts and media were alerted one by one and in a press release, as well as at the March 10 conference. Care was taken, however, to engage the company's 2,300 employees throughout the rebranding process.

The early impacts were promising. FICO's market value increased 80% in two months. According to Pacalin, analysts said "the renewal of the brand was certainly a cause." 

Design: Ammunition (creative director Brett Wickens)

Submitted by: Tony Spaeth, 9/06/2009
Status: Confirmed by Laurent Pacalin, Chief Marketing Officer, 19 May 2009
Category: Software & Analytics
Country (HQ): United States