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ServiceNow built its name on IT service management, and its old wordmark said so plainly: the o in now was drawn as a PC power button. At the company's Knowledge18 conference in Las Vegas in May 2018, chief executive John Donahoe took the stage, according to ServiceNow's own blog in front of some 18,000 registered customers, partners and employees, and unveiled a new brand identity to reflect the company's purpose.

Donahoe contrasted the two logos directly. The new one features a human form in the letter o of now, replacing the power button, and the goal, he said, was to place people rather than technology at the centre of the brand. Brazilian tech publication Baguete, which covered the event, quoted him explaining that the challenge is not the technology itself but putting the employee at the centre of the experience and making systems serve people. Baguete framed the move as ServiceNow trying to widen its image from a company focused on IT management to one covering services for human resources, security and customer service.

The rebrand arrived with a new line, Works for you, which ServiceNow said was expressed across signage and booths at the event. Diginomica, also reporting from the conference, observed that the branding was now people centric, replacing IT visuals with people visuals, with a generally softer approach, and judged that Donahoe's consumer experience was clearly having an impact that could resonate with buyers beyond the IT service management faithful. His keynote line was that the next three to five years would be a revolution at work.

As symbolism, the swap is almost too neat: power button out, person in. It tells the strategy in one glyph, which is exactly what a company trying to sell to HR and customer service leaders needed. The risk is that a tiny figure inside a letter is easy to miss at small sizes, and a person icon is hardly ownable. But the softer, rounder wordmark and warmer system did the real job, moving ServiceNow away from looking like a utility for system administrators. It is a sensible, if literal, piece of repositioning.