We know it may seem strange to talk about rebranding during these miserable times. Conventional thinking would be to wait until the crisis is over, but with many companies being exposed to serious levels of disruption, this time might be the ideal opportunity to sit back and look at your business thoroughly. Take this stagnant period as a chance to evaluate your brand and think of possibilities that might help you stay afloat.
Basically, rebranding is the act of a company reinventing its appearance or message to better appeal to their audience. Many brands adapted their marketing initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic as an attempt to promote behavioral change and a caring image. The greatest example being Pfizer.
The pharmaceutical giant is one of the leading names in developing and producing a successful vaccine against COVID-19 — in collaboration with BioNTech — managed to not only use such an opportunity to present a new look but to completely reposition its brand. It seems Pfizer wants to be associated with innovation and cutting-edge development, rather than identified simply as a maker of medicines and vaccines.
„Pfizer has become much more than a pharmaceutical company. Our new logo signals this shift from commerce to science. We’ve unlocked the pill form to reveal the core of what we do: a double helix, spiraling upward.” (source: www.pfizer.com)
Considering the use of colors the company turned to an expressive shade of blue, usually associated with the field of technology. Stepping out of the two-dimensional world, the brand device operates with 3D elements, thus achieving an authentic modern-day look. The new typeface applied is Noto Sans, which according to the branding has a contemporary, modern, yet global feel to it. The font family provides characters for more than 800 languages across the globe.
„Noto Sans is a font designed for tomorrow. Developed by Google to internationalize the internet, it is philosophically and aesthetically aligned with the new Pfizer.” (source: www.pfizer.com)
The company’s slogan (“Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives”) remained unchanged.
If you’re still unsure whether it was the appropriate time for a rebrand or the company should have put all their effort into producing vaccines, you might want to take a look at the competition before making a hasty decision.
We can agree on the fact that pharmaceutical companies very rarely have well-designed visual identities and generally they communicate in an alienating tone. If you think about it, it all makes sense, as these businesses do their working in the background. For an everyday person, it is not likely to encounter them. Now this condition has changed due to the global pandemic. All these companies are competing in a sense, maybe not for money at this point, but for trust.
A good logo can’t fight COVID-19, but it definitely boosts reputation which might come in handy in such chaotic times.
