New typefaces, logos, and colors are a common way to refresh a brand’s image. Changing a company’s name, however, is a risky move that can cause confusion in the marketplace with customers, prospects, and cost a lot of money to execute.

The brand marketers over at Bacon’s thought that it was in their best interest to take on that battle. In an e-mail message yesterday from CEO Steve Newman, the announcement came fresh with a new logo atop a glassy bar of blue in the header.

Our new name, Cision, reinforces the distinct but related strength of our worldwide organization. It projects our position as a global leader and our commitment to serving our clients seamlessly.

How does a new logo, name, typeface, and colors do this again? We’re big fans of cool branding over here at the pulp – don’t get us wrong – but that explanation is ripe with empty words that are so non-specific, we don’t even want to read them.

The best brand connection is between you and me, 1:1. Don’t make us feel like we’re minions in a sea of ambiguity.

Bacon’s has (edit: had) so much cool brand equity that it could have played off of really well and communicate its transition to a global leader with innovative products for the PR and greater media markets.

For example, the image that a lot of seasoned PR pros still have of the company is that giant directory of media contacts that you can get for some ridiculous fee. Play off of that – shred that puppy to bits and morph it into a Web-based app. Show how many trees they’re saving now. Send out free bacon-for-a-year gifts to best clients. Have fun. Instead, they were always pumping up the communications cycle and its offerings along the way.

A visit over to the now conglomerate’s Web site is just as stale and depressing as the note from the CEO today. So we stared at the logo a bit more and asked to ourselves: is it pronounced siz-e-on or siz-shun? The best we can figure out it’s like a snipped version of the word decision.

One word: booo.

Right around the same time, Vocus reaffirmed its outlook on the year and is shaking the trees with a follow-on stock offering of up to 60M shares.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 6:37 am and is filed under Design, Marketing, PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.