One on One with BCG's Massimo Portincaso on Firm's New Logo and Rebrand

The Boston Consulting Group (now Boston Consulting Group), today launched a rebranding initiative, which includes a pretty significant logo change for the 55-year old firm, aimed at better reflecting where BCG is today. To discuss the rebranding and the logo, Consulting magazine caught up with Massimo Portincaso, Partner and Managing Director of the firm, to discuss all aspects of the initiative, including the massive effort from conception to design to roll out. Following an example set by Google a few years back, BCG set out to give the entire firm a unified look and feel. Portincaso led BCG through the entire rebranding process and discusses some of the finer points, including the look of the new logo and the decision to drop the "The" from the Boston Consulting Group brand.

Consulting: How did this rebranding come to be? Can you take me through the process?

Massimo: I would say this was more of an emergent rebranding rather than a top-down rebranding. Five years ago we had very different visual language, which was very traditional and related to the management consulting we did in the past. We started to change piece by piece all the different components of the BCG brand on a global scale—everything from our web presence all the way through to our PowerPoint presentations. BCG is a very different company than it was just five years ago and what was missing in this process was what happened with Google—bringing all those pieces together. So, at the end of this emergent process, we realized we were missing the capstone that would bring unify all the pieces. This wasn't change for the sake of change; we had changed the way we presented ourselves to the world and now, at the end of that journey, we are changing the logo. We are asking people to look at BCG in a whole new way.