Misty Muscatel Davis

I would consider myself more of a manager of creativity. I am excited and inspired to bring together the best and brightest creative minds and turn them loose on a challenge. I welcome their questions, new ideas, different ways of looking at challenges and coming up with awe-inspiring results.

Circana provides a 360-degree, full-circle understanding of the consumer, store, and wallet, to advise the world

Creativity is an essential element of a communications challenge. It is developing visuals, text and symbols that address the challenge clearly, elegantly and in a thought-provoking manner so new opportunities are generated.

A creative idea/design is one that inspires, intrigues, and draws in the viewer. And it almost always reflects non-mainstream and non-traditional thought.

Our brand development process started with extensive research, including a comprehensive survey of over 750 IRI and NPD clients and prospects, more than 40 in-depth, one-on-one interviews with clients, industry, and media analysts, and live, online listening sessions involving over 570 employees from both organizations across the globe. The result of this meticulous research effort included the generation of 2,700 potential new brand names, 200 logo concepts, and 1,100 taglines. Additionally, two linguistic studies spanning 22 languages and markets were conducted to ensure that the name and tagline would resonate appropriately in all countries where the company operates. In the end, we were very pleased with how cohesive and reflective it was of our tagline: Complexity into Clarity.

One of my favorite parts of the creative process is brainstorming ideas and opening the doors for anyone to provide their own creative thoughts. After our new brand announcement, we gave all Circana employees Midjourney access and started a company-wide contest to design images for our Growth Summit event. Overall, 22,000 images were created, and the winners had their images featured on big screens during the event. It was really rewarding to see how invested people were in the rebrand, but it also gave Circana a means of marketing the benefits of its new brand to customers.

We

Creating Circana was an exhaustive, 360-degree process. In a span of six months, we embarked on the journey of creating a new brand that would embody the combined heritage of IRI and NPD, which together boasted nearly a century of history in the market research industry. It doesn

The biggest challenge was coming up with a new name and logo. One of the things we knew we wanted to do moving forward was move away from the acronyms of our two heritage companies since a very low percentage of people actually knew what either of the heritage companies

The award has demonstrated to the Circana management team and, in fact, to all employees that the six-month effort was worth the tremendous amount of work the rebranding was.