Retail Data Firm Circana Builds a New Brand From the Ashes of Acronyms

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.

But when clients are accustomed to seeking out that information from their familiar acronyms of choice, how do you let them know it’s all in one place? By keeping the Circana brand simple, Davis said, and intentionally using details like a clean, sans-serif font, the tagline “complexity into clarity,” and a logo of interlocking circles that evoke Venn diagrams of complex consumer data.

However, there was nothing simple about selecting any of those elements. Davis said her team sifted through 2,700 names, created more than 200 logo concepts and came up with upwards of 1,000 taglines before landing on Circana’s complete package. 

The reasoning wasn’t simple, either: The name “Circana” used a circle as its root, alluding to the “marriage” of IRI and NPD Group. Having two “C”s was also important—to represent “the complete consumer”—and carried into the “complexity into clarity” tagline. CEO Kirk Perry wanted a logo that could tell the story beside the company name, so six concentric circles stood in for both overlapping data and complex consumer behavior.

The work ahead

On March 20 at the Wynn in Las Vegas—about two weeks after Circana’s rebrand—the company brought in 1,200 clients for its first event as any brand since 2019. When Circana surveyed attendees before and after the event, it found that 44% liked the rebrand and, in the end, 81% had an extremely positive perception of what the company stood for.  

While there’s still a segment of Circana’s client base that identifies with the IRI and NPD Group brands, Davis said that clients’ interaction with the brand in Vegas helped acclimate them to the idea that the services they enjoyed were simply found under a new name.

Using the AI-fueled art platform Midjourney, Davis’ team built a custom script that applied Circana’s color palette to images of shopping carts and shopping bags made from particles of data. When the brand launched, Circana gave all of its employees Midjourney access, started a company-wide contest and let them design images for a week. The winners had their images featured on big screens at Circana’s Las Vegas event.

Altogether, Circana employees created 22,000 images of retail products. It got employees invested in how the rebrand would work in the wild, but it also gave Circana a means of marketing the benefits of its new brand to customers.

“It has created an [opening] for us to open a dialogue with clients about the combination of these two [companies] being such an incredible opportunity for them to be empowered to make better business decisions,” Davis said. “We can now look at a profile of a consumer and understand the trade-offs and trade-downs across everything they’re buying.”