CBA’s new logo reflects ‘measured optimism’

Commonwealth Bank’s ubiquitous diamond logo is getting its first makeover since privatisation almost 30 years ago.

Monique Macleod, CBA’s chief marketing officer (left), and Priscilla Brown, group executive marketing and corporate affairs, with the new logo. Picture: Britta Campion

Commonwealth Bank’s ubiquitous diamond logo is getting its first makeover since privatisation almost 30 years ago, as the bank seeks to portray the country’s “measured optimism” about recovery from COVID-19 and a devastating bushfire season.

Group executive marketing and corporate affairs Priscilla Brown said the minimal redesign, which retains the dominant yellow diamond but replaces the black wedge with a deeper shade of yellow, also reflected lessons learnt from the financial services royal commission.

“We’ve listened to what people have said about the royal commission, and we’ve taken huge measures to address it,” Ms Brown said.

“But it’s not so much that we want to shed ‘the old’.

“We want to respect the heritage but reflect what’s going on this year — how Australians don’t really want to lick their wounds but have measured optimism about the future and they want to get things going.”

The brighter yellow was also more appropriate for digital use — an important factor given the surging popularity of digital channels, which has been fanned by the pandemic as customers avoid the human contact in branches.

In its 2020 annual result, CBA said digital accounted for 66 per cent of the value of the bank’s transactions, up from 59 per cent in 2018 and 52 per cent in 2016.

Users of the CommBank app surged to 6.1 million, up from five million at June 2018 and 3.7 million in 2016.

Despite the huge changes in the business environment since CBA first opened its doors in 1911, this will only be the fourth time that the logo has been refreshed. The yellow diamond and black wedge, representing the points of the Southern Cross star constellation, emerged from the last makeover in 1991, before the advent of digital.

The intention in 2012 with the addition of the word “Can”, a year after Ian Narev became chief executive was, to symbolise the can-do attitude of the bank and the nation.

Can has been used as a tagline in advertising campaigns.

Chief marketing officer Monique Macleod said the word was “stress tested” in a round of interviews with customers to see if it was still appropriate.

The tagline was found to have maintained its relevance, although the decision was made to update it to “Can lives here”.

Ms Brown said decisions to update logos were not made lightly by large corporations.

This was especially so in Australia, because the CBA logo was much more widely recognised than major bank emblems in the US, for example.

“I haven’t seen elsewhere in the world a financial brand which has the significance of the CBA brand here,” she said.

Ms Brown said CBA would earn the trust of Australians by doing the right thing.

“That, of course, hasn’t always been the case, especially in recent years,” she said.

“Our past mistakes and failings, which culminated in the royal commission, gave Australians good reason to doubt us. As painful as it was to accept that, we readily accepted we had let customers, communities, shareholders and our people down.”

Since then, she said, CBA had been on a quest to rebuild trust. It had sought to make it easier to do business with the bank. Duplication has been cut, unnecessary fees and charges reduced or abolished, and non-core businesses had been sold. She said CBA’s reputational scores were now at their highest in seven years.