CiscoCopied

Cisco Systems' old logo put a stylised Golden Gate Bridge and the company name inside a box. Brand officer Gary McCavitt had long struggled with it: hard to use, hard to put on products and dated in personality, according to the case study published by Corporate Brand Matrix. CEO John Chambers approved a redesign on one condition, that the DNA of the bridge be kept.

The designers ditched the box altogether. The bridge was simplified further into a row of vertical bars above the name, and the emphasis moved to what the case study calls the brand's greatest asset, the Cisco name itself, now set in capitals and without Systems.

What began as a technical, design-led rethink gained momentum once senior managers linked it to positioning and marketing. The logo anchored a campaign built around a new message, the Human Network, signalling Cisco's shift in positioning and products under Chambers.

The name changed too: Cisco Systems became simply Cisco in the logo. iTWire put the cost of the wider makeover, including the Welcome to the Human Network campaign, at around $100 million, and BetaNews framed it as an effort to raise Cisco's public profile beyond enterprise hardware. On UnderConsideration's Speak Up forum designers mostly welcomed the simpler mark, though some found the bridge too abstract to read and the red and blue a little like Christmas.

Computable in the Netherlands carried the local pitch. Cisco's Dutch managing director explained that the emphasis was no longer on the physical bridge of the old logo, San Francisco's Golden Gate, but on the virtual bridge between people, under the line the power of the human network. The repositioning explicitly reached into the consumer market, on the argument that every employee is also a consumer and that end users, not big companies, now drove innovation. Reframing a bridge as a metaphor rather than a landmark is neat, and it let an infrastructure company speak about people without changing what it sold.

Bars that read as both a bridge and a signal were an elegant answer for a networking company. It is a good example of a logo change that started as housekeeping and ended up carrying strategy, which is how the best corporate redesigns tend to happen.