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Citi's New Brand Architecture    
Ever since the mega merger with Travelers - Citigroup has been gradually evolving its brand architecture. The latest moves have just been announced.

 

 

Citigroup Announces Unified, Global Brand Identity Under "Citi" Name

Citigroup Inc.
(WebWire) 2/13/2007 1:55:43 PM

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Underscores Commitment to Unified Company to Serve Clients and Deliver Shareholder Value

Definitive Agreement to Sell "Umbrella" to The St. Paul Travelers Companies, Inc.

February 13, 2007 - New York – Citigroup today announced a corporate branding change that unites its businesses under the well-known "Citi" name and its recognizable red arc design. This decision underscores the company’s commitment to bring its businesses together to serve clients worldwide.

"Our unified brand represents the promise to serve our clients as one company, as one Citi," said Charles Prince, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "It also speaks to our exciting future as a highly connected, responsive, and profitable global leader in financial services."

"Citi is already among the most recognized and respected brands in global financial services. Our extensive global research and analysis also confirmed Citi is a highly effective brand across many languages, markets, and technology platforms. It is how most of our clients think about us already," Prince said. "Now, through a unified brand, we will leverage this symbol to represent our commitment to providing our clients with best-in-class advice, products and service."

The company also announced that it will sell to The St. Paul Travelers Companies, Inc. the trademark red umbrella that a legacy company acquired with its purchase of Travelers in 1993. The sale is conditioned upon Hart-Scott-Rodino approval, and is expected to close in March. Net proceeds from the sale of the umbrella will offset the future costs of implementing the unified brand.

"Our research continued to show that the trademark red umbrella was more connected with insurance, specifically St. Paul Travelers," continued Mr. Prince. "We are pleased to have entered into this agreement."

Beginning in the second quarter of this year, the following businesses will begin using a silver Citi with the red arc logo: corporate and investment banking will use the brand name Citi; wealth management will use the brand names Citi Smith Barney, Citi Investment Research and Citi Private Bank; and alternative investments will use the brand name Citi Alternative Investments. A list of Citi logos is attached.

Citi’s global consumer businesses, including the Citibank branch network, will maintain the signature blue Citi with the red arc brand name and signage. Also, there are no plans at this time to change the Banamex brand in Mexico. Primerica will also maintain its brand name, but it will use a new logo without the red umbrella.

While the company will do business as Citi, its legal name will remain Citigroup Inc. In addition, the names of its various affiliated legal entities will not change.

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Citi

Citi, the leading global financial services company, has some 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 100 countries, providing consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, and wealth management. Major brand names under the trademark red arc include: Citibank, CitiFinancial, Primerica, Citi Smith Barney and Banamex. Additional information may be found at www.citigroup.com or www.citi.com.

Certain statements in this document are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These statements are based on management’s current expectations and are subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. Actual results may differ materially from those included in these statements due to a variety of factors. More information about these factors is contained in Citigroup’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Financial Services
Folding Citi's Umbrella
Liz Moyer, 02.13.07, 2:15 PM ET  
 

Analysts criticize its strategic direction. A senior executive recently was assigned to cut costs out of a bloated infrastructure. Questions linger over ties between one of its former top executives and an anchor for CNBC.What does Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ) do? It decides to drop "group" from its name and sell its red umbrella logo back to Travelers.That ought to fix things, right? Its new, pithy brand name, Citi, "speaks to our exciting future as a highly concentrated, responsive and profitable global leader in financial services," said Chief Executive Charles Prince in a statement Tuesday announcing the plan.If only it were that easy. This isn't the first time Citi has "rebranded" its global businesses, and it likely will not be the last. But the move marks a further departure from the old guard, led by Sanford I. Weill, who built the company from its origins as a troubled Baltimore commercial lender in the 1980s. Weill was proud of the Travelers umbrella logo, and had it emblazoned on just about everything including his own neckties. While still at Travelers, Weill bought Salomon Brothers in 1997 and merged it into his Smith Barney brokerage division. Corporate and investment bankers from Salomon Smith Barney continued to use the red umbrella after the 1998 merger of Travelers and Citicorp. It helped to differentiate them from the retail bankers who rolled coins in branches.That tension between the corporate and retail side, long present (and certainly not unique to Citi) may have been Prince's reason for the name change.Nobody outside the company refers to it as anything other than Citi, anyway. The name change appears to be intended to motivate employees to act more as one team. This is an offshoot of a project Prince initiated two years ago, when he set out to create one culture and one set of corporate values after Citi was beset with a series of embarrassing missteps, one of which got its private bank kicked out of Japan.But cosmetic changes to the brand won't solve deeper issues at Citi--namely a cost base that is growing faster than the rate of revenue growth. In December, Prince unveiled a cost-cutting plan led by investment banking head Robert Druskin. The company hasn't revealed details, but analysts have said it could result in a substantial restructuring charge. Some analysts have called for a break up of the company, saying its corporate and investment bank, its brokerage and its consumer lending operations are worth more apart than they are together.Then there was the management shakeup. Last month, Sallie Krawcheck, the chief financial officer, was moved aside to head the wealth management division, whose former head, Todd Thomson, left abruptly after questions about his corporate spending and his close ties to CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo. (See: Dennis Kneale, " The Real Mess Behind Mariagate.")As part of Tuesday's announced changes, Citi is selling that red umbrella logo it inherited from Travelers Group back to Travelers. (The company, now known as St. Paul Travelers, is changing its name back to Travelers, too). Proceeds from the sale of the umbrella logo, which were undisclosed, will pay for the cost of taking "group" and the umbrella off Citi's documents and assorted property.Landor Associates, a New York firm that specializes in corporate branding, consulted with Citi on the brand change.In research, the red umbrella still resonated more with the legacy insurance operations, which Citi has long-since shed. The sale of the logo is expected to be completed by the end of March.Branding has been a hot topic lately. Last week, Ford Motor (nyse: F - news - people ) announced plans to rebrand several of its models to its popular Taurus brand. Cingular, the wireless company, recently announced plans to change its name to AT&T.Allen Adamson, a managing director at Landor, wrote on his blog this week, "The real challenge will be re-imbuing the names in question with positive associations--a difficult trench to climb out of for any brand." 

 

 

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January 15, 2007

Just ‘Citi’ as the Brand, and a Folded Umbrella

By ERIC DASH

Citigroup, the global banking giant, is shrinking — but only its name. Executives are prepared to rebrand the company "Citi" and to fold up its familiar red umbrella and instead use a logo with a stylized arc above the name. The new name and look, which follows a 14-month review of the bank's brand, will be presented to the Citigroup board this week, according to several executives close to the process. No final decision has been made and it could still undergo some minor changes. "We continue to work on our branding effort and will announce our decisions when it is completed," a spokeswoman, Leah Johnson, said. If adopted, the revised Citi brand and logo will be used at nearly all the vast financial services company's businesses, including retail branches and its investment bank concentrated in the New York area, and showcased around the world.The design is similar to the "citi" logo that now appears on much of its consumer advertising, office buildings and credit cards. A rollout could begin as early as next month.The plan to unify Citigroup's businesses under a new, single brand is part of an ambitious campaign by the chairman and chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, to better integrate the bank's sprawling parts after years of acquisitions — a strategy investors are still waiting to see pay off. Symbolically, it also marks the end of an era. Just as a new name became one of the signatures of a transformative deal by the former chairman, Sanford I. Weill, a more coherent brand strategy signals Mr. Prince's plans to shift the focus of a company sometimes seen as a deal machine to one largely powered by internal and international growth. The brand makeover comes out of the playbook of other big companies. Apple Computer, for example, last week shortened its name to Apple emphasize its broader ambitions for other technologies, like the new iPhone. Several years ago, Morgan Stanley ditched the suffix of Dean Witter, and Federal Express became just FedEx.By shedding the suffix "group" as well as the red umbrella, Mr. Prince is severing the bank's most tangible ties to Mr. Weill, Citigroup's patriarch, who made the old Travelers Group logo a key term of that company's landmark 1998 merger with Citicorp and who is rarely seen without a small umbrella pin affixed to his lapel.Over two decades under Mr. Weill, Commercial Credit turned into the Travelers Group, which morphed into Citigroup — while many of its operating businesses like the retail operations, Citibank, and the brokerage arm, Smith Barney, adopted their own looks and retained their old names. Over the last few years, Citigroup's consumer businesses took on the "citi" prefix to become CitiBank or CitiMortgage without an overarching plan or a formal approval process. Its card business, which spends the largest amount on advertising, became known as Citi. The result, in the eyes of some, was a mishmash of logos and titles that appeared disconnected, while many Wall Street clients, Main Street customers and even Citigroup employees simply referred to the different parts of the conglomerate as Citi. Now, Mr. Prince hopes to unify the company under one global name at a time he is urging more cooperation between the businesses. He also hopes to achieve some small cost savings on media spending, which totaled $623 million in 2005, according to TNS Media Intelligence.Most of the operating businesses are expected to adopt the "Citi" prefix, but each will use a different color arc to maintain a distinct look. Citi's corporate and investment bank will feature a black arc; its wealth management division will use a red arc, and its consumer businesses, a blue arc. Banamex, its Mexican retail bank, and Smith Barney are expected to retain the old names. Since October 2005, a panel of senior Citigroup business leaders and marketing executives has been evaluating the future of the brand. At the time, Mr. Prince said he believed that the company could benefit from "a more coordinated approach" to dealing with "one of our most important assets."The company hired Landor Associates, a brand-consulting firm owned by the WPP Group, and put Ajay Banga, a co-head of its consumer businesses, who helped build PepsiCo's Pizza Hut and KFC franchises in India, in charge of the review. Still, many in the company were divided. Top investment bank executives, some of whom had been campaigning for the resurrection of the Salomon Brothers name, initially thought that the adoption of the consumer brand's Citi logo would cheapen their image. Smith Barney executives expressed similar concerns. By late fall, when Citigroup announced that it would call the New York Mets' new stadium, CitiField, there was a growing consensus in favor of the new look. Plans were not final, however, until mid-December. At the same time, other Citigroup managers were deeply divided over the fate of the red umbrella.In the end, however, Citigroup's brand committee decided to drop the 137-year-old symbol, which has adorned the bank's pitch books, buildings and business cards — as well as some executive attire. It has also been a source of local controversy. In 1997, a TriBeCa community association petitioned to have the neon umbrella removed from Travelers' 39-story headquarters building at 388 Greenwich Street, now home to its investment bank. The New York City Buildings Department said it was a logo, not a sign, and it stayed after the company agreed to dim its lights overnight and turn it off for four hours after sunset.Now it appears that the umbrella will be folded up altogether. Citigroup executives said that outside marketing research suggested that the umbrella had no resonance for bank customers in the United States, especially since the Travelers insurance businesses had been spin off. Outside the country, a bank executive said, the symbol is associated with insurance as well as with bad luck in certain Asian countries.Whether or not Citigroup retains the rights, or sells it to another company, remains a question. It is also unclear what will happen to the 16-foot, 5,300 steel umbrella that sits outside the investment bank in Lower Manhattan. Of course, Mr. Prince may already have a place to display it in mind. Several months ago, he half-jokingly suggested to Mr. Weill that "if it ever does happen, that he is going to have to take the umbrella in front of our office downtown and move it out to my home in Greenwich," Mr. Weill recalled in an interview last fall.

 
Published Feb 26 2007, 09:34 PM by Mark Ritson
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