In 2017, the two major global players within Credit Management Services (CMS) joined forces: Swedish Intrum Justitia and Norwegian Lindorff. Through a merger, they became the global market leader with the widest reach, highest revenues and largest number of employees in the world. Their joint operation now spans over 24 markets.

Illustrations
Bo Lundberg

Photography
Felix Odell — CameraLink
Petrus Olsson — Crosby

After the cumbersome process of getting the merger approved by the European Commission, the main challenge was to combine these two leading companies and their different business agendas. Another objective was to convince the stock market about the value of the merger and to make hundreds of thousands of clients and customers relate to a new brand.

The first sub-project was to develop a new name for the combined company. After evaluating several scenarios as well as benchmarking similar cases, the name Intrum was decided. The main reason was that the name Intrum Justitia had relatively high brand equity compared to the Lindorff name. In addition, Intrum was short, space efficient, and widely represented and recognized. It also received a high degree of acceptance and liking both within the Intrum Justitia organization, as well as within the Lindorff organization.

The merger also meant developing a new brand through a new brand platform that summarized the essence and ambition of Intrum. Kurppa Hosk made a broad market outlook as well as quantitative and qualitative studies to get an in-depth understanding of employees, clients and customers. With the findings from the research, a new brand platform was built where one of the driving elements became the new mission: “We help companies prosper by caring for their customers”. A mission built from the insight that Intrum’s clients benefit from Intrum treating their customers respectfully and fairly.

The new position was in turn defined as “The undisputed market leader” and the new purpose was defined as “Leading the way to a sound economy”, deriving from the concept that Intrum helps its internal employees, clients, their customers and society at large. Given the combination of two very strong cultures, the new values were maybe the most important brand component of all: to reflect the driving forces and motivations of the combined organizations, the values were defined as Empathy, Ethics, Dedication and Solutions.

The next project initiated was designing a new brand identity that visually and verbally articulated the brand platform and that could be adapted across all touch points. The brand identity also became an important internal change facilitator symbolizing the cultural journey ahead. Due to extreme time constrains because of upcoming external and internal key-events, the identity concept was developed through a highly agile method in just 6 weeks.

The brand identity, as such, is driven by a strong logo aiming to convey the trust and power of a market leader yet still humble, as Intrum is very much a “people’s business”. The bespoke typeface derives from the anatomy of the logo whereas the colors reflect the optimism of the new brand.

After the new brand and brand identity were conceived, our focus was to launch and implement the brand identity as efficiently as possible. To avoid chaos when implementing the new brand in 24 markets, we developed guidelines for the brand identity that were distributed through a brand portal along with detailed instructions for how to implement the brand and brand identity in each market.

We also designed a detailed roll-out plan and, together with Intrum, helped set up a tailored organization within the company, for implementing and managing the rebranding. In order to support stakeholders in Intrum’s markets, clear processes for validations and Q&As were also defined. Two years after the new brand was conceived, it has been well received and the implementation has been successful.