Last year was a monumental one for Informa, with the purchase of UBM in January 2018 forming the largest exhibition company in the world. Earlier this week, the London-based company announced another big change: a new brand identity for one of its divisions. Going forward, Informa Exhibitions will be known as Informa Markets.

This new identity reflects the company’s ongoing development and expansion, along with its focus on enabling the success of its customers and the specialist markets in which they work, from health and nutrition to construction, pharma, agriculture and more.

Informa Markets consists of more than 550 international B2B events and brands and employs 4,400 colleagues across 40 countries. Chances are high that you're familiar with some of their portfolio. 

To accompany the change, Informa Markets’ new website launched this week. We sat down with Charlie McCurdy, president and CEO, to learn more about the change (you can also read another interview with McCurdy on TSNN, HERE).

What does it take, in your mind, for a company such as yours to successfully rebrand?

Certainly it’s a new brand for a business that’s an equal combination of a legacy exhibitions business and a legacy events business. Looking at the strategy and objectives of each of these companies, after a lot of internal discussion, the name Informa Markets seemed to reflect our sense of purpose. A lot goes into it; one is preparation and putting time into the process. Most fundamentally, it comes out of exploration within the organization and among colleagues to arrive at a name that is both meaningful and impactful.

How will you educate your clients about the new brand?

As far as the unfolding of the brand, we’re in good shape. We’ve introduced a new website and plan to transition signage in the office; those processes have all been done before. As far as deployment of the brand around the world, we’re [being] very mindful of that and taking an especially careful approach to socializing the brand among the company and with our customer base.

Should clients expect any changes?

In a very large number of cases, the Informa and UBM names were at most secondary to the shows clients would participate in, so there’s little day-to-day impact on clients. What I’d like to see, and what has developed within our company, is [for our colleagues] to think of themselves as great organizers of exhibitions, yes, but perhaps more importantly that they have a big role in making these specialist markets work effectively. The underlying impact of the Informa Markets name is the orientation to our role of helping bring opportunities to people in the specialist markets we support, in addition to organizing exhibitions. Exhibition referred to the product; Markets refers to the purpose we have as a company.

You’ve undergone many changes over the last year. Will you slow down on that front?

I won’t say we’re slowing down; we have a lot of work to do to run a global business. The task this year is to put in place the activities the combination [of the two companies] promised, such as addressing these vertical markets on a global basis. Our job is to be a great exhibition company and more. The role we play in helping buyers find qualified suppliers and suppliers find qualified buyers is a very powerful one.

Watch a video on Informa Markets’ new brand identity HERE.

Photo credit: Informa Markets

This story originally ran on TSNN. 

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