CognizantCopied

Cognizant revealed a new logo and tagline, Intuition engineered, on 21 March 2022. The Hindu BusinessLine reported the rationale from the company's release: a new brand positioning designed to better reflect its expertise in digital technologies, after an aggressive expansion into artificial intelligence, cloud, the Internet of Things and software engineering, partly through more than 3 billion dollars of acquisitions over three years.

Digital represented about 44 percent of the business by the end of 2021, and the brand was the visible part of that bet. The tagline, the company said, expresses how technology should enhance businesses so that they can act with human insight at superhuman speed.

Chief marketing officer Gaurav Chand was candid about the motive. Cognizant had evolved dramatically over the past few years, he said, but perceptions of the company had not shifted at the same rate. The new identity was meant to reflect the value it brought to its Global 2000 clients and show the digital leader it had become. He also said the tagline was designed to resonate with the company's more than 330,000 employees as well as clients.

SightsIn Plus quoted the company's digital business president as saying the company had introduced a new visual identity that better mirrored what it had become, and that while it might look a little different, it was just a new perspective on who it had always been.

That line captures the problem with this kind of rebrand. In IT services the logo is rarely what clients buy; it is a signal to analysts, recruits and staff. Cognizant said as much. The identity exists to close a perception gap, and that kind of job is measured in contracts, not in typography.