Alongside a new logo reveal Thursday, Johnson & Johnson unveiled some major changes to its corporate persona.
Specifically, J&J is uniting its medtech and pharmaceutical arms so that they will be “more connected to the Johnson & Johnson brand," the company said in a release.
Over time, the company's storied Janssen brand is slated to become Johnson & Johnson Innovate Medicine. J&J's medical technology segment will continue to run with the J&J MedTech moniker.
Janssen got its start as Janssen Pharmaceutica way back in 1953 in the Belgian town of Beerse. Founded by Dr. Paul Janssen, whose work resulted in at least 80 medicines, the company sold to J&J in 1961.
The move comes several months after another major overhaul at J&J: The separation of the company’s consumer health arm Kenvue.
J&J’s consumer group Kenvue—which sells popular brands such as Neutrogena, Aveeno, Tylenol and Listerine—launched onto the New York Stock Exchange in May, trading at $22 per share for a total IPO value of around $41 billion.
Shortly thereafter, J&J leveraged a share-exchange offer to significantly slash its holdings in Kenvue, in which it now holds a roughly 9.5% stake.
The separation has been pegged to “further sharpen” J&J’s focus on “transformational innovation” in its bread-and-butter pharma and medtech businesses, CEO Joaquin Duato previously said.
As for J&J’s identity shakeup, the company is just one of multiple Big Pharmas to undergo a corporate facelift in recent years.
The trend started with Bristol Myers Squibb in 2020 when the company ditched the hyphen in its name and adopted a new purple hand graphic on the heels of its $74 billion Celgene buyout.
Pfizer and Sanofi also switched up their corporate logos in 2021 and 2022, respectively.
Perhaps most notably, however, was GlaxoSmithKline’s pivot to GSK. Like J&J, GSK’s name change came as the company spun out its consumer business Haleon.