VisaCopied

On 13 January 2014 Visa launched Everywhere you want to be, an evolution of its famous It's everywhere you want to be tagline, and with it a refreshed logo and visual identity for what it called one of the most recognised brands in the world.

The brief came from Antonio Lucio, Visa's chief marketing officer, who tied the change to mobile and e-commerce carrying Visa payments to more people and more places. The platform was explicitly about heritage: Visa said it reconnected the company to the line that had made it famous.

The headline change was colour. Fast Company reported that the wordmark dropped gold entirely for the first time, keeping only a hint of it in the tagline's lettering. The blue was deepened, some letters slightly sheared, and a horizontal gradient introduced. The blue and gold go back to 1958, when Bank of America mailed out the first BankAmericards, coloured after California's blue skies and golden hills, and each later revision had trimmed a little more gold away.

Visa did not credit an outside designer in its announcement, which focused on the platform and an Olympic-themed TV spot.

The tagline was a revival, not an invention. The New York Times noted that Visa was bringing back "It's everywhere you want to be," which had run from 1985 to 2006, trimmed of its first word and replacing "More people go with Visa." The difference, Visa and its agency BBDO Worldwide argued, was scope: the old line had appeared only in American consumer ads, while the new one would address consumers, merchants, banks, governments and staff worldwide. Marketing-Interactive added that BBDO led the rebrand, that Visa declined to say what it cost, and that the launch spot featured ski jumper Sarah Hendrickson ahead of the Sochi Olympics.

Fast Company described reaction as ambivalent at best and hostile at worst. The logic is sound: gold stood for the prestige of owning a credit card, and by 2014 Visa wanted to be the default way to pay, not a status symbol. The execution is less convincing. A gradient on a wordmark ages quickly, and the sheared letters add fuss to a name that was already strong.