What are “information resources?” What is a “purchase diary panel?”

What is an indri, and would people necessarily associate a Madagascar lemur with data?

When scan-based consumer data firm IRI merged with consumer market research agency The NPD Group a year ago, the newly formed company’s marketers asked all of the questions above as they plotted its future. As it turned out, few people were as attached to the “alphabet soup” of preceding acronyms as they were to the data and services they provided.

“When you think of what both of them stood for—Information Resources Incorporated and National Purchase Diary—they were antiquated [and] they didn’t stand for something,” said Misty Davis, CMO of the company dubbed Circana earlier this year. “One of the things we knew we wanted to do moving forward was stand for something and be able to be understood, but a very low percentage of folks actually knew what either of the heritage companies’ acronyms stood for.”

Between IRI and NPD Group, there was more than 90 years of equity invested in invaluable consumer data services, but completely disposable brands. After 17 years at Google helping home and healthcare companies build and launch brands, Davis began her first CMO gig last year by going over interviews and surveys of IRI and NPD clients, going through AI-aided listening sessions with employees and determining that a new, combined brand was needed.

The lesson that Davis took away, and that other marketers may consider after other mergers and acquisitions, is that brand equity is only valuable if it’s relevant to the brand’s most modern incarnation. As Davis discovered when her team chose Circana as its new identity, sometimes it takes a new brand to preserve decades’ worth of your product or service’s goodwill.

“We realized that bringing these two companies together, which in many ways have very similar DNA—IRI in the CPG space and NPD in general merchandise—was going to create something new that neither IRI nor NPD really stood for,” she said. “So that new name became the choice.”

Forming the circle

The Circana brand was introduced in March, and many of the company’s promotional and press materials still contain the phrase “formerly IRI and The NPD Group.” But with each conversation with clients and retailers, Davis said there’s been positive feedback about having all of that retail data under one roof.

Circana tracks the sales of millions of products in more than 2,000 categories. Its services reach more than 500,000 stores in 20 countries, with data circling back to 7,000 global brands and retailers.

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