Inside the Thomson Reuters rebrand with CMO David Carrel

Hi Dave. Hi, how are you Phoebe? I'm good, how are you? I'm doing great. Well, thanks so much for coming on today. I know that we're here to talk a little bit about the rebrand. I would love to hear, so obviously you're the CMO, right? So what was sort of your part in the entire rebranding process? Oh, good question. I joined Thomson Reuters about a year and a half ago and pretty soon after joining, we started to think about, hey, Thomson Reuters has changed a lot and two, we have a big ambition of where we want to go in the future to be the leading content-driven technology company. And while we had done a lot of change internally and our employees and key people here knew our ambition and where we're going, I realized our customers were not viewing us this way and we had some big work to do. So starting soon thereafter, started to build consensus internally with our CEO and we have a brand team here that had also been doing a bunch of great work and saying, starting to think about, hey, we need to change. In the past, Thomson Reuters had been kind of a holding company, and what that means to our listeners is a collection of companies that kind of operate somewhat independently. And over the past four to five years, that has really changed to be an operating company where the businesses act together, we can do more cross-sell. And as we did this, the Thomson Reuters brand becomes even more important to be meaningful to our customers. So all these changes and all these trends, whether it be external, the company, what's happening, and then with the advent of generative AI, and Thomson Reuters, you know, we have a really strong roadmap, probably over 10 products we're launching across generative AI. We've actually been a leader in AI for 30 years, so just artificial intelligence, machine learning, and then when generative AI came out, we did a lot more work there. So a long way of saying to answer your question, I started to think about this soon after joining and as the forces came around, we said, hey, we really need to reposition our company. And it's much more than a new color or a new logo, although I love the new colors and the new logo. It's really letting our customers see us in a new way. And really, I'll tell you, the results have been fantastic. We just launched just a couple weeks ago, March 12th was when we launched externally, and you know, lots of excitement both internally and externally. But the thrust and the push was because the company has changed so much and we really wanted our customers to know it and see us in this new way.

Yeah, well, one, we have a new brand promise around clarifying the complex and really helping our customers who are legal, tax, risk, compliance professionals, people that use information. We're helping them clarify all the complexity that exists today. And the big customer insight that we really saw as we did some of the research over the past several months and before we had the brand launch was that customers look to professionals for guidance in complex situations, but even professionals risk being overwhelmed with so much change in today's world, regulations, new laws, compliance, the rise of new technologies. And where Thomson Reuters can really help is helping clarify that complexity for all of our professionals we serve, whether it be legal, tax, and news. So that was really the genesis of the positioning. So that was a real big change for us. Additionally, we updated our logo, which we haven't done since we launched this logo back in 2008. We've done also a new visual identity. We added a new racing green color. Thomson Reuters is really known for our orange. We updated our orange a little bit but also added this racing green. We added a new font. We have a new brand platform of 'Know today, navigate tomorrow.' So we really went across, I call it three planks: really our customer insight and how we help customers with our customer promise and brand promise, a visual change in identity with the logo, the colors, and then the messaging and the brand platform. So really across the board, it's been a pretty big change.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We worked with Code and Theory who's been a fantastic partner with us. They helped us along the way. We also have a strong and mighty brand team internally that partnered really close with Code and Theory on research, ideation around the messaging. Obviously, Code and Theory was a big part of our visual identity. And then after, you know, we had their ideas, we validated this with over 400 customers as well too. And we serve a wide variety of customers, the largest Fortune 100 customers, small independent tax and even law firms. We serve risk professionals globally. So we did a bunch of research and, you know, across the board, the customer feedback has just been so overwhelmingly positive. People really like it. And I'll tell you, Thomson Reuters employees, we have about 26,000 employees globally, you know, they're really pumped up about it. So lots of excitement around how the brand has really come to life. People are, you know, really jumping in on it and feel really positive momentum.

Yeah, well, as I talked about a little earlier, a lot of definitely consumers and even some of our customers, they know our products but they didn't know the brand Thomson Reuters as well. And you know, that has historically, like I said, been more of a holding company. It wasn't put first and center with customers. And so we wanted to make sure customers really knew what Thomson Reuters stood for. And our ambition is to be the world's number one content-driven technology company that serves legal, tax, risk, news, compliance professionals. So we really wanted to make sure customers knew who we were. And while a lot of customers love our products, love our people, you know, we have super high attributes on our brand on trust, reliability, comprehensiveness. So customers really have a strong positive association of working with us. But we really wanted to articulate and tell customers who we are, what we do, what do we stand for, and how we can be their partner, their trusted partner into this new world of generative AI. So those two different trends came together really, really nicely in our brand launch because we were already starting to think, hey, we need to reposition the company, we need to tell customers who we are. We've been really strong on AI and generative AI. And in fact, we launched our first generative AI product globally, not globally, but to customers last November. So ChatGPT came out end of '22 and a couple quarters later we're launching our generative AI product. So we have a lot of good generative AI momentum and product capability. And so with this, and you know, everyone's talking about AI now, but we really wanted to let customers know this is really part of our DNA and it's a really strong part of our brand of where we want to go. So letting customers know who we are and then letting them know how AI can really help them because we serve professionals and they're looking at information, they have to do a lot of research, they have to create, whether it be Word documents, PowerPoint slides. So these are really two areas where AI, generative AI can be really helpful: research and creation. And that brings together what we do. So it's just a nice fitting of, hey, our brand position with the rise of generative AI, and we wanted to make that a big part of our brand launch.

That's a great question, and I'm sure many people aren't familiar. Three big, big areas: legal, tax, and then corporations, and then news, Reuters news. So I guess four. Our biggest would be legal, that's, you know, the biggest piece of our business.

So Westlaw, Practical Law.

Yeah, so Westlaw, market-leading product, if not household brand level name, known by many, many people including yourself. And that's one thing I talked about or at least I mentioned earlier, a lot of customers and consumers know our products but they didn't realize Thomson Reuters was part of that. And we hadn't, as a company, we hadn't really leaned into our brand as much, but you'll see that going forward more. We're leaning more into our brand, representing what our brand means. So you'll see that more and more.

No, I would not say it's used to support. You know, each business is a strong business independently. Reuters is a 170-year-old, global, world-renowned, trusted brand that, you know, when you go about and talk to people, people on the street, everybody seems to know Reuters in many ways. So the news, but it's not the largest part of our business, like I said, legal is. But you know, it's a strong, it's growing. Each area is a strong business on its own right. And how they come together is that we're serving people, professionals who need deep expertise. And whether that be in tax, in law, in risk, even in news, Reuters tends to go deeper and have different verticals and, you know, really, really strong beat reporters that we can provide news and information to our customers.

Yes, definitely. I mean, we're focused on professionals and how we can help them with tools, with software, with information, and any way we can help them. So news is a key part of that. And the Reuters news is so trusted and well-known and objective, it's a real strong brand for us in that space.

You know, it's a really good question because as you touch on, AI is everywhere now. Even just looking at advertising, right, you go to any web page or podcast, you know, everyone's an AI company. And you got to look at, well, okay, what's the differentiators here? What makes this AI better than someone else's AI? And this is what makes Thomson Reuters so powerful is we have unique, proprietary content that we've been developing for 100-plus years across legal products, and that content and the AI is built on that content that only we have. So as you know, probably with the large language models, how they get trained, you know, they got to be trained on unique content. And so it's a huge differentiator when you have world-class content, which we have both with our Thomson Reuters work as well as Reuters work as well too. So that's one, a huge differentiator. Two, another key area of differentiation, and I think everyone, yourself, listening to this podcast can relate to, is you need to trust the AI. You know, there's been, what, there's been, you know, many publications about what's called hallucinations where the generative AI kind of makes things up. And we don't have that. We work to limit that and prevent that. And we also have lots of trust in our brand. I talked about this earlier: reliability, trustworthiness, comprehensiveness. And it's just a part, I would say, of the DNA of our people. And the other thing we really bring that's unique that helps us improve our products and our generative AI capabilities is industry expertise. Again, back to the content and knowledge. So we can really go deep in certain areas that can make our work and our software differentiated. So to your question around, hey, everyone's doing AI, it's a buzzword, it's venture capital getting funded, totally agree. And really where we can differentiate is the strength of our generative AI, our trust, our content, our expertise piece. And then even back to, like I said earlier, we've been doing AI for 30 years. And one thing we like to call out, we've been doing search before Google even existed. Westlaw search, you know, the 1990s. So we've been having a lot of capabilities and just how do you search and search customer information and present it for years and years. So, you know, all these really give a strong, I would call, differentiated as well as advantages from other companies or whatever might be going on in the AI space.

No, I mean, 2008, you know, predates me, but that's when Thomson and Reuters came together and they created the brand. So it was kind of driven, I don't want to say by necessity, but by, hey, we need to come up with a new brand. And now, you know, like I said, the time is right now for us because we see this as a moment of strength. We got some tailwinds at our back. The company has made a bunch of changes, again, like I said, over the past several years. And now we have a really strong slate of new products that are coming out and strong ambition across the company that we really want customers to understand who we are and where we're going. Because right now, customers across the board, they're looking for their trusted partner to help guide them through these times of change. And it's actually quite interesting, like I talked about in our customer insight, how people look to professionals in times of complexity and for guidance. And in some regard, that's happening even now with this transition to generative AI. We have a lot of our customers, hey, saying, Thomson Reuters, help us think through this, what does it mean for us? So it's an interesting parallel moment right now.

There's some. I mean, the one thing I would say for Reuters, it's really a trusted, recognized brand, you know, for objectivity. And it doesn't get pulled into some of the maybe points of lack of trust. I mean, obviously in general, yes. So we don't see that as a major point for us. But in terms of younger consumers, I think you always want to make sure you're bringing in a new batch of customers no matter what the age or what the product. And I think as we have our new brand and we focus on professionals, we're always looking to bring in more. Hey, how can professionals gain from our news products?

You know, that's a really good question. I really like that question. I think for sure, yes. I think as Gen Z or, you know, people even in college, come out of college to start new jobs, I think the new tools available to people today, generative AI, ChatGPT, just one of them, gives you the power to be a professional and to work differently. And one of the things we actually do here, and we have a whole team focused on thought leadership as part of the marketing team, is we've published a report the last several years called 'The Future of Professionals.' And we've looked at across, you know, key segments such as legal, tax, risk, corporations, you know, areas where we're involved. And, you know, one of the things that we see that people are focused on is one, training, hiring, and recruiting and bringing in professionals into the workforce and getting them trained up in the right ways. So I definitely think, you know, young people will come up and be seen and feel as professionals. And I know for sure a lot of the companies that we work with are also focused on that and investing in training, bringing in new people, and making sure they know how to use new tools.

We have tens of thousands of small businesses as our customers, entrepreneurs, solo practitioners, shops with less than, you know, 10 people. So we have a lot of customers already in that base who consider themselves entrepreneurs who are using our tools. And we think it's great. We're super supportive of them. And I think that, like you said, entrepreneurs, creators, they need tools more than anybody, right? They need to create, they need to publish, they need to be efficient, they want to make sure they're productive. And our tools are really focused on efficiency, improving productivity, enabling you to do things faster and easier. So it's really set up really, really great for them.

In general, I think it'll be great. I mean, a few of the things we really focused on with the brand was modern, technology-driven, fresh. We tested it, like I mentioned earlier, over 400 customers, all customer sizes and levels. We went up from like people, you know, individual contributors, line managers, up to C-suite and make sure we got content and research and insights across the board. And, you know, I tell you, it's been really, really positive. It's been a really strong refresh and I think we tapped into some of the look and feel and the trends and just made it a much more modern and updated looking brand.

Well, definitely interested to learn more about Thomson Reuters at thomsonreuters.com. Invite people to come there. You can find me on LinkedIn, happy to connect and shout out to anybody there. And I would look forward to any other feedback from all your listeners. And Phoebe, thank you, it's great speaking with you, really, really enjoyed our time.