“We're the biggest company nobody's ever heard of.”
ABM
Bringing brand clarity and relevance to a 100-year-old company—for the next 100 years.
ABM Industries is a FORTUNE 500 company that had evolved over the course of a century from a small window-cleaning business into a world leader in manpower provisioning. While best known for its core business in janitorial services, a series of acquisitions added capabilities in parking management, security and building systems engineering, making ABM a global player in the building maintenance category.
The 2010 acquisition of the Linc Group marked a dramatic inflection point in ABM’s history. This addition enabled the company to enter the lucrative Integrated Facility Solutions market, and provided new technologies that could be used to better deploy its workforce. The result: An opportunity to dramatically expand its footprint, enter new markets and deliver more sustainable solutions globally.
Leveraging the Linc acquisition as a rationale for re-branding the corporation, ABM leadership and BrandingBusiness set a goal of sending a new message to the marketplace, signifying a new day at ABM. Our research revealed that, despite its impressive size and scope—at the time, $5B in revenue and over 100,000 employees—ABM was pigeonholed as a janitorial company and a custodial brand. The marketplace had limited awareness of, and insight into, the company.
Further, ABM’s acquisition history left it with a complicated brand—a kaleidoscope of regional, sub-specialty brands without a strong, unifying framework.
BrandingBusiness simplified ABM’s brand architecture under a “Branded House” format, setting the corporate master brand over its major lines of business and rolling up its many sub-brands.
We developed a new brand position centered on Integrated Facility Solutions that articulated ABM’s unique value proposition: A global work force, enabled by technology, deep vertical expertise and unrivalled breadth of services—all delivered in an ecologically responsible manner and vertically integrated across a single platform.
A new logo was designed to honor the company’s workforce, and BrandingBusiness added a new tag line: Building Value. The new line conveyed its clients’ primary physical assets—their buildings—along with ABM’s singular role in increasing those assets’ worth.
To signal the emergence of this new ABM, we created an entirely new visual expression system and formal identity guidelines.
We also developed a wide spectrum of applications, including fleet graphics, tradeshow elements, brand video, collateral, posters and the ABM Annual Report.
With the launch of the new ABM, its more than 100,000 employees now had a shared identity and vision, a deep sense of pride—and a brand that could fuel the company for the next hundred years.