Vibrant, Orange But Not A Household Name: Conduent Seeks Its Post-Xerox Identity

Conduent has opted for a logo with bold, capitalized text and an orange symbol as the $7 billion process services company prepares to strike out on its own.

The typeface is intended to provide government and large commercial customers with a sense of stability, experience and reliability, while the use of orange should help Conduent stand out in a crowded marketplace, according to John Kennedy, Xerox's chief marketing officer. Conduent will spin off from Xerox's $11 billion document technology and document outsourcing business by the end of 2016.

"Orange gives you energy. Orange is vibrant," Kennedy told CRN. "Orange invokes a lot of characteristics we want to be. And orange is distinctive."

[RELATED: Xerox CTO To Retire Following Company’s Split]

Xerox's incredibly strong brand recognition has long opened the door for its global services practice – which is ranked No. 9 on the CRN Solution Provider 500 – to engage with enterprise clients, Kennedy said, providing a major leg up. But Conduent now has to create its own recognizable identity so that customers recognize it as the continuation of Xerox's business process outsourcing (BPO) unit, he said.

"In a way, we're kind of like a startup," Kennedy said.

Although Conduent is focused on getting the word out about the changes to its existing clients, Kennedy said it's simply not realistic - or even necessarily desirable - to capture the level of brand recognition Xerox has achieved over the past 80 to 100 years.

"Whether Conduent is a household name or not is not as strategic to this company," Kennedy said. "Given the nature of the work we're doing, it's almost best when we're invisible."

Since Conduent does large amounts of work on behalf of enterprises or government agencies around areas ranging from automated tolling to medical claim processing, Kennedy said being invisible usually means that everything is going well. Kennedy said he'll be joining Conduent as its marketing and communications leader.

At the same time, Conduent is concerned with reaching prospective buyers early in their purchasing journey, which Kennedy said requires strong search-based, digital and social marketing. Plans are therefore currently in the works to roll out Conduent.com, activate the social channels associated with the company, and stand up the new company's intranet, Kennedy said.

"We've got to go develop a brand story from the beginning," Kennedy said.

Events are also a major forum for business-to-business companies like Conduent to have face-to-face contact with their customer community, so Kennedy said the company is working on converting its events-related assets from Xerox to Conduent so that it can be present, participating and visible at events going forward.

Conduent spent three months working with a design firm to come up with a logo. Kennedy said the process began by interviewing senior leaders around the characteristics the company aspired for as well as seeing where clients felt like the company created the most value.

The consulting firm created "more than a handful" of initial designs for Kennedy and his associates, which was narrowed down to a shortlist of three that the team was most enthusiastic about.

"We only saw things that we felt like were executable and were really aligned to the brand we had," Kennedy said.

The final selections were shown to Conduent's senior leadership team and tested with clients to see which they were the most responsive to. Although the three final options were very different, Kennedy said executives and clients alike felt the ultimate selection would be the best vessel for storytelling and explain what Conduent is and the value it creates.

"We're very excited about what we landed with," Kennedy said. "We're on the right track."