Moody’s
Decoding risk and unlocking a world of opportunities
Beyond ratings: Building a bolder Moody’s brand
For over 115 years, Moody’s has served as a trusted voice on every aspect of financial risk assessment. While best known historically as a credit rating agency, the business has in fact grown much broader than ratings, with a rapidly expanding portfolio of data, analytics, and solutions. Yet feedback revealed that customers did not fully understand all the company had to offer.
The Moody’s evolution has been wide-ranging, from offering the world’s biggest database on companies and credit to providing leading climate models to being a first mover harnessing AI that accelerates digitization and automation for its customers and employees, Moody’s knew that its brand had to evolve to keep pace with its business—and with an increasingly complex risk landscape. The Moody’s brand needed to strengthen beyond the name, to become more relevant, further differentiated, and consistent for customers across its solution areas. Furthermore, it needed to further engage employees to align with where the business is today and will be in the future.
Reaching these goals is critical in the era of exponential risk, unifying the Moody’s brand and fortifying the company’s legacy as a trusted voice on integrated risk assessment in the market for generations to come.
From strategy to brand feel to identity: a clear, bold, and perceptive Moody’s brand
To meet this challenge, we conducted a Brand Strength analysis and designed a global research program to uncover the current perceptions and future aspirations of the Moody’s brand from both the internal and external audience perspective.
The results made clear Moody’s unique Purpose in the market to uncover meaning amid uncertainty so that individuals and organizations can thrive. Beyond just driving better business results, it connects the deeper value of what Moody’s does to the greater benefit it creates in the world. The brand’s updated Trajectory of “Decode risk, Unlock opportunity,” provides a clear roadmap of how to create a better future for Moody’s customers and employees—and ultimately reach the brand’s new Mission “To be the leading source of relevant insights on exponential risk.”
Bonded by Purpose, Trajectory and Mission, the new Moody’s brand is united under a Monolithic brand architecture to streamline the global portfolio to ensure it is fluid and functional, enabling customers to more easily navigate Moody’s wide spectrum of risk management solutions.
The new strategic foundation is reflected in the visual and verbal identity of the Moody’s brand, while preserving the signature elements— a brand that feels Bold, Clear, and Perceptive. The brand feel is translated into a set of voice and design principles to ensure that we deliver a consistent customer experience. The new brand look and feel is executed through a distinctive tone of voice and defined narrative, made up of an organized set of hierarchical evergreen messages to support customer communication.
As a digital-first brand, the new expression works effortlessly across all touchpoints. The new logo was a nod to the legacy, inspired by the Moody’s manuals. The construction of the apostrophe is built to resemble a speech bubble and becomes an ownable graphic element representing the voice of Moody’s when elevated on its own. An iconic, instantly recognizable monogram has also been crafted and can be used as a favicon. The new signature Moody’s Blue was evolved from the heritage blue to provide richer contrast in digital mediums and stronger distinction from the many other blue brands in the industry.
The result is a reimagined Moody’s—a more cohesive, differentiated, and relevant brand with the confidence to own its category of one—that is firmly grounded in its rich history as the leading name in integrated risk assessment.
Establishing a bold presence in the market
To ensure effective and efficient brand management moving forward, we partnered with Moody’s to create a comprehensive plan for brand tracking, implementation, governance, training, and roll-out. Brand Strength is used as the framework to periodically track the performance of the Moody’s brand moving forward. Standardized brand development processes were instituted, and systems were implemented to facilitate the global and local needs of the Moody’s brand. Executives and employees were educated and trained on the brand prior to the brand launch to generate anticipation and excitement.
The brand was launched on March 6th globally. Celebrations were initiated in New York, with satellite events in London and Costa Rica. The launch event was kicked off by Rob Fauber, President and Chief Executive Officer of Moody’s Corporation and Christine Elliott, Moody’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer.
The brand launch served as an inspiring and unifying moment for the company’s global employee base, as teams came together to begin adopting and embracing the reimagined Moody’s brand proudly as their own. Moody’s has made an iconic move toward redefining itself as a category leader for generations to come, using its brand as a driver for shifting external perceptions and unifying its global organization.
