Merger Spree Fuels Corporate Logo Boom Identity Specialists Swamped By Rush To Update Old Icons, Create New Ones

No one expects McDonald’s to give up its golden arches or Coca-Cola to abandon its signature red cans, but truth be told, Microsoft’s flying windows icon is the wave of the future.

That’s because animation, computer graphics and things that seem to fly, spin or shimmy are in when it comes to corporate branding.

Corporate icons, often the most ubiquitous message a company offers, are now being rethought, refashioned and updated to better compete in a global marketplace that is being radically altered by deregulation, computer technology and hip-hop fashions.

Large companies - from MCI to Tenneco, as well as leading brands like Pepsi - have redesigned their images: unveiling new icons, tweaking old colors and even compressing their names to broaden appeal, as with Fedex and KFC.

Not since the mid-1980s have so many companies tinkered with their icons, and perhaps never before has the corporate identity industry seen such an unusual confluence of events pushing so many changes.

“I’ve been in the business 30 years, and I’ve never seen so much activity,” said Kenneth D. Love, vice president and creative director at the Lippincott & Margulies unit of Marsh & McClennan.

Much of the activity is attributed to the wave of mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs in telecommunications and other industries, creating new logos for AT&T’s Lucent Technologies spinoff and 3M’s Imation.

MCI has a new star-burst logo to help it position itself as a company that now offers Internet access and local telephone service. And Federal Express Co., in part to rid itself of the bureaucratic image associated with the word federal, has bowed to common usage and accepted the nickname Fedex.

And no longer can identity specialists ignore the Internet when developing a corporate logo. “When you’re creating an identity you have to consider all its applications,” said Clay Timon, chairman and chief executive at Landor Associates in San Francisco, a unit of Young & Rubicam Inc. that developed the new Fedex identity. “We knew ‘Fedex’ had to work in an electronic site.”

Because of such changes, some corporate identity firms are reporting record growth. For instance, billings at Lippincott & Margulies in New York have doubled the last two years, and profits at Landor Associates were up 33 percent last year.

In fact, the rush to create new icons has reached such a pace that scores of companies with global ambitions are imitating one another with stars, comets, swooshes, horizons and globes, creating a glut of spherical, space-inspired icons that Tony Spaeth, a identity consultant, calls the “cliche of today.”

If there is one idea that encompasses most of the new icons, it is motion - streaking, slashing, orbiting motion, anything that suggests movement. Microsoft’s windows, besides appearing to float through space, also break into pieces, another device that is gaining favor.

Fearing they might be left behind, stalwarts, like the U.S. Postal Service (an aerodynamic, computer-generated eagle) and Xerox (a red, digitized “X”), have in recent years created new logos, which can cost up to $400,000 for the design and as much as $1 million for a complete identity revamping.

Industry officials say the life of a corporate logo, once thought to be 15 to 20 years, may be on the decline. MCI recently unveiled its fourth logo in 26 years, and Pepsi is testing what might become its third can design in seven years.

“When I started in this business changes in a trademark were sacrosanct,” said Alan Siegel, chairman of Siegel & Gale, a unit of Cordiant PLC. “It was so evolutionary, you didn’t see it. Now, there’s a whole range of trademarks that break away from the cold, stark graphics of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Moira Cullen, a director at the American Institute of Graphic Arts in New York, a professional group of graphic designers, says identity specialists are borrowing from pop icons like MTV, which uses its own animated, ever-changing logo.

“The audience is saturated with rapid, quick images on TV and computers,” she said. “In order to grab someone’s attention and to stand out, it’s important to modify a logo, jazz up an image and add animation. Everyone’s doing it. It’s kind of this pre-millennial modification.”