For more than a century, CME and CBOT have been building distinct identities in the marketplace – brands that reflect their leadership positions in the financial community. Through product innovation, advances in technology, growth in value and marketing communications, the respective exchanges have instilled a set of perceptions and expectations with stakeholders that define the companies and their ideals. In July 2007, the evolution of these brands entered an exciting new era.
The CME-CBOT merger not only unites two exchanges, but combines two powerful brands – our business legacies and customer relationships. As we move forward, it is from an even stronger platform given the products and services we can provide, the opportunities we can pursue, the solutions we can offer, and the ways we can communicate. It gives our newly formed organization an ideal opportunity to restate our core promise to our stakeholders while the world watches.
Today, the CME Group brand strategy is designed to clearly support our organization's business strategy, with far-reaching implications both internally and externally.
The CME Group brand aligns employees with our mission to continue delivering industrydefining, innovative products and services to our customers.
To customers and other stakeholders, the CME Group brand asserts the company's competitive advantage and indispensable role in the world: “helping improve the way markets work.”
With a customer-centered brand that resets expectations internally and reaffirms relationships externally, CME Group is creating an enterprise where inventiveness, service-oriented culture, market share, volume, liquidity, global reach, reputation and shareholder value continue to expand.
So how is CME Group making the benefits of its brand tangible to customers? Most likely you already have seen it. Over the past two years, CME has produced key communications including annual reports, a magazine and – most visibly – a global advertising campaign that demonstrate our company's role as a financialenabler in the professional lives of our customers. The ad campaign, for example, showcases leaders in the global markets to illustrate how CME technology, products and clearing capabilities enable them to manage risk and make decisions with confidence. CBOT customers and capabilities will be added to the already successful print ad campaign, which appears regularly in The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and Financial Times.
One of the most visible – and valuable – expressions of the CME Group brand is our updated logo and visual identity. At the time of the CME-CBOT merger, we evolved the “look and feel” of our brand to more strongly reflect and support brand strategy, and to signal the new organization. A new logo now accompanies the CME Group name, incorporating historic elements common to both exchanges – the shape of the CBOT octagonal trading pit, the traditional CME blue color – but with a simplified icon and fresh typography. The updated brand identity will influence the design of all CME Group communications.
The refreshed CME Group brand reflects the need to connect with and inspire a wider audience of customers, partners, investors and employees. By embedding the CME Group brand throughout the organization and CME Group communications, we help customers, employees and other audiences know what to expect from the new company, and what it stands for.
Back to Summer 2007 Issue Home
