Pfizer, GSK, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi all went big and made some major changes to their corporate looks and logos over the past three years, but the convergence of bio and tech for Sanofi’s 2022 rebrand has seen it earn new plaudits.
Two years ago, the French Big Pharma launched a fresh rebrand that centered on a clean, lowercase new logo with two purple dots at the start and end of its name.
Those two purple dots “embody the scientific journey between a starting point and a finish line—the eureka moment where innovative solutions are unlocked to impact people’s lives,” Sanofi said in a statement at the time.
That replaced its old logo, which had a green, pink and blue series of shapes similar to a bird forming a circle, with SANOFI in all caps in blue underneath. The new logo is also “inspired by the simple and motion-oriented codes of the tech industry,” Sanofi said.
The Sanofi "s" intentionally truncates just at the bottom, revealing a reversed question mark to symbolize the company's inquisitive nature and the spirit of "what if?"
There was also a brand unification. More than a decade after buying out U.S. biotech Genzyme, it moved the Sanofi Genzyme unit under the Sanofi branding. The same goes for its much older vaccines unit, Sanofi Pasteur. All of its other buyouts will also use the new brand.
The changes all tied in with the company's 2019 “Play to Win strategy,” which put science and innovation at its core, with a focus on first- and best-in-class treatments and vaccines.
Pfizer had undertaken similar corporate and logo changes before Sanofi, while GSK, J&J and Novartis swiftly followed on after the Big Pharmas in launching their own rebrands.
But it was Sanofi’s changes that earned it a spot as one of the winners of distinction for the 2024 REBRAND 100 Global Award, now in its 20th year, that hands out gongs to projects launched between January 2021 and October 2023.
Sanofi, which was featured alongside Deutsche Bahn, Cadence Bank, Team Global Express and Suchard, was picked as the “new brand is rooted in heritage, bringing a diverse history together in a single common identity One Sanofi, one identity and one purpose: to chase the miracles of science to improve people’s lives,” REBRAND said in a statement.
Getting access to viewer data, the firm found the new branding is having a positive impact. New brand portal traffic saw 63,000 internal users, with 2,150 external agencies and 3,250 source assets stored (and counting), with 1,200 daily visits taking place.