The Tendo View

FICO logos

In March 2009 Fair Isaac Corp. announced that the company would now be known as FICO, a name already familiar to most of its customers. Why the change? Tendo recently talked to FICO’s David Feder, vice president of corporate marketing, about the key drivers behind the transition, the company’s goals, and the lessons learned from the rebrand.

Tendo: What was the impetus to rebrand FICO (formerly Fair Isaac)?
David Feder: One of the major drivers was the need to align the corporate brand with the name our customers already used. In markets like Europe and North America, we were already called FICO. The intention was to align with customers’ thinking and to create simplicity in a world of complexity by unifying behind a single brand.

The marketing team recognized that the FICO brand was underleveraged. FICO scores are seen as a tool to create a level playing field among consumers and limit discriminatory lending—they created a standard by which people were judged. Today this idea plays out by continuing to ensure that consumers have access to the right type of credit, that they are protected from fraudulent activity, and that they have a say in the activities that are taking place.

As the financial crisis played out, we realized that we needed to have a strong leadership voice within the context of this crisis. We also wanted to create synergies and marketing efficiencies. Those forces came together—the need to be more effective and the recognition of an underutilized asset (the FICO name) that was well understood by consumers.

Tendo: How did you approach this rebrand?
DF: The tenets of our brand were rooted in the idea of consumer empowerment–that was a unifying force. Ultimately, we used a 21st century approach. It’s an old business adage that you need to build a brand over time with a consistent message. But today consumers are more empowered than ever before, and a lot of things debunk the old strategy of gradual brand building.

Communication is such that companies build brands much faster than they have historically—almost overnight now. And consumers are more finicky about the brands they endorse. At FICO, we need to let consumers be at the helm in terms of defining what our brand is. We’ve doubled down on the tools through which we enable our customers to create an open dialogue about products and services. We engaged third-party social networking resources like LinkedIn and YouTube, and we also developed a proprietary social networking community.

The old tactics of driving awareness through one-way communications clearly would not work. Our objective was to create a multidirectional feedback loop. This took guts from a company perspective, but it stemmed from recognizing that conversations will happen about your company and your brand. If you don’t participate, they’ll just happen without you.

We did a lot of listening to customers to help us confirm that the FICO brand had a tremendous amount of saliency and relevance—and strengths in a tumultuous market. When we looked at the blogosphere and measured the chatter taking place about FICO vs. Fair Isaac, it was 50- or 75-fold FICO.

Tendo: What other models did you look at?
DF: In fraud, we’re known for a product called Falcon. In business rules, we’re known for our Blaze product. Because of that, we explored the idea of a house of brands as opposed to branded house. But we recognized that C-level executives invest in a company, not in a product, and customers don’t always make discrete decisions (fraud and collections, for example, sometimes go together). Within that context, a branded house based on siloed products did not make sense.

Tendo: How did you develop the new logo?
DF: It was a highly collaborative process. The brand strategy activity and the decision to align under FICO was an internal decision, and then our design agency helped us find a creative design to articulate this vision to the outside world in a way that was highly professional, with a level of design sophistication that met the expectations of our customers. They helped us to create a corporate identity which would be highly recognizable and also flexible in terms of applying the logo in multiple media as well as multiple sizes.

Tendo: How did you roll out the new brand?
DF: We used existing vehicles. It wasn’t a big bang—more of a rolling thunder to avoid incurring big expenses. We timed the rollout with our major conference (FICO World). It was a captive audience of our employees as well as our major customers.

Tendo: What were some of your key takeaways?
DF: In any large organization that’s spread out across geographies and has dispersed product lines, there’s a risk to conform to consensus, and that can lead to the lowest common denominator of ideas. Our management team, though, helped us avoid that. We considered all opinions, but we created a name and a logo that didn’t suffer from a crisis of consensus.

Tendo: How have you measured your success?
DF: We’ve measured it in three parts. Internally, the use of FICO to refer to the company has become broadly adopted. And for a company that has many long-standing employees who had rich histories tied to Fair Isaac, this is no small task. Secondly, in the tumultuous financial services landscape, our business has been relatively strong, with customers expressing strong interest in our Predictive Analytic solutions—and they’re asking for FICO. Lastly, while by no means a point directly tied to our brand transformation, FICO’s stock price has rallied in the past six months.