Xerox Hopes Its New Logo Doesn't Say ‘Copier’
Still think copier when you hear the name Xerox? — The company knows that you do. And it is sick of it. Good grief, Xerox doesn't even make stand-alone copiers any more. — These days, Xerox gets most of its revenue from machines …
Context & Ripple Effects
By the time of this rebrand, Xerox had already left behind the business the public associates with its name: the company no longer makes stand-alone copiers, and most of its revenue comes from other machines. The new logo is an attempt to close the gap between what Xerox actually sells and what the word 'Xerox' calls to mind.
The obstacle is linguistic as much as visual. 'Xerox' is an established example of a brand name that became a verb, cited in English dictionaries as far back as 2006 — so the company is trying to redesign an identity that everyday speech keeps re-stamping with its old meaning.
First-order effects
- Xerox is committing marketing spend to a symbol change meant to reposition the brand around its current product mix, since the copier association no longer matches where its revenue comes from.
- Every customer touchpoint carrying the new mark reaches people who still use 'xerox' as a verb for copying, so the campaign competes with ordinary language rather than rival advertising.
Second-order effects
- If the rebrand shifts perception, Xerox can pitch its machines on what they do instead of defending a category label it abandoned when it exited stand-alone copiers.
- The verb cuts the other way: each casual 'xerox it' re-anchors the old identity, meaning the repositioning requires sustained repetition rather than a single launch.
Third-order effects
- Xerox illustrates the structural trap of genericide — the more completely a name comes to define a category, the harder it becomes to move the brand beyond that category, whatever the product line does.
- For category-defining hardware makers, brand identity lags the business: logos and campaigns are the visible layer of a slower repositioning away from the product the name was built on.
The trend: Category-defining hardware brands are investing in identity overhauls to catch up with product mixes that have already moved past the category their names own.