Johnson & JohnsonCopied

Johnson & Johnson's logo was based on the signature of co-founder James Wood Johnson and had been used since 1887. By 2023 the company had separated its consumer business, including Band-Aid, Listerine and the baby shampoo, into a new company, Kenvue, and wanted to present itself as purely focused on healthcare innovation and tackling the toughest health challenges. The pharmaceutical unit Janssen was renamed Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, alongside Johnson & Johnson MedTech.

The new identity was created by Wolff Olins, which also designed Kenvue's branding. The script was replaced by a modernised red sans serif wordmark. The company kept its red, refreshed, and the ampersand, though it lost its hand-drawn quirk and now presents itself, in the company's words, as a more globally recognisable symbol. Stratégies noted new art direction, illustrations and photography were created alongside. J&J said it hoped to build more equity around a short-form J&J that could show up in a more personable, contemporary way, especially in digital interfaces, with the brand appearing in motion and responding to different environments.

Kenvue products would keep the old logo for a while, until stock was replaced, after which the script would disappear entirely.

The decision caused wide debate on social media. Creative Review listed the theories, from distancing the company from talc lawsuits over its discontinued baby powder, which J&J denies, to cursive falling out of favour in schools, and settled on digital performance as the likelier reason. It placed the logo among pharma blandification, alongside Kenvue and Wolff Olins's own GSK, and asked whether abandoning a universally recognised logo was really the only way to signal change.

Fierce Pharma placed the change in a wave of Big Pharma tidying after Sanofi and GSK's 2022 rebrands. Alongside the logo, the Janssen name was being retired over time, with the pharmaceutical business becoming Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine and the devices unit Johnson & Johnson MedTech. The new wordmark, each letter drawn in a single pen stroke, would not look out of place at a tech company, the outlet noted. The company planned to build equity in a short-form J&J for digital use, put the logo in motion, enlarge the ampersand as a more globally recognisable symbol, and brighten its red.

It was not. A signature that old is an asset most brands would kill for, and Coca-Cola has shown heritage scripts can live comfortably on screens. The new wordmark is competent and completely interchangeable with its peers. J&J may have thrown away its most valuable visual asset to look like everyone else.