Electronic ArtsCopied

By the late 1990s Electronic Arts sold games under a crowd of names. Its sports line, EA Sports, was the best-known thing it made, while the rest came out under the studios it had bought, including Maxis, Westwood and Bullfrog. The company's own mark spelled out its full name. In May 2000 it announced a unified brand image across all its products.

The approach was to copy what worked. EA expanded the look of EA Sports into two new labels: EA Games, which took in titles previously sold under the owned studios' names, and EA.com, covering its co-branded games channel with AOL. The corporate identity became an EA monogram adapted from the EA Sports mark. The unification went beyond the box: EA created a single installer and a single set of splash screens for the whole range.

Don Mattrick, then EA's president of worldwide sales, put the logic plainly. EA Sports stood for state-of-the-art graphics and gameplay, and by adapting its imagery for EA Games and EA.com, EA was telling consumers the games came from the same teams with the same integrity and attention to quality.

PRWeek reported the commercial scale in Europe: EA, then the region's biggest games seller with about a fifth of the market, was folding its titles into two corporate brands, EA Sports and EA Games, backed by a 20 million pound ad campaign, with EA.com to follow for online sales. Seven established labels, including Bullfrog and Westwood, would be dropped. That is the real story behind the mark: a publisher deciding that its own initials, borrowed from the sports line, were worth more on the box than the studios that made the games.

It is a textbook masterbrand move, and it worked largely because it promoted something customers already trusted rather than inventing a new symbol. The cost was the studios: names like Westwood and Bullfrog, which meant something to players, were pushed behind the corporate letters. The EA monogram itself has stuck. In 2006 it was set inside a circle that echoed EA Sports even more closely, and it has been refined since, but the two letters chosen in 2000 remain the company's face.