The problem with having been in business for four decades is that people remember what you used to do.
McAfee, the cybersecurity company that became synonymous with antivirus software in the era when Americans were still learning to fear their email attachments, has introduced a new brand identity. The effort, which began appearing on Monday, is meant to remind consumers that the company now offers a broader range of services, including scam detection and dark web monitoring — products that have become rather more relevant as the threats facing ordinary computer users have grown considerably more sophisticated than the viruses of the 1990s.
The impetus for the change, according to Stephanie Fried, the company's chief marketing officer, was research showing that 68 percent of consumers still associate McAfee primarily with antivirus protection. That is not, in itself, an insult — Ms. Fried noted that the company "wins on trust" in its brand tracking studies — but it does suggest a certain narrowness of perception.
"We've been around for almost 40 years," Ms. Fried said. "The downside is that we're known for what we've done from a heritage perspective."
(One might observe that being known for one's heritage is a complaint more typically heard from European royalty than from software companies, but the sentiment is understandable.)
The rebrand arrives at a moment when artificial intelligence has begun to reshape not only the tools that cybersecurity firms offer but also the threats they are meant to defend against. McAfee, which has cycled through various corporate owners and structures since its founding in 1987 — including a stint as a subsidiary of Intel — appears to be betting that a visual refresh will help consumers see it as something other than the program their parents installed on the family Compaq.
Whether four decades of muscle memory can be overwritten remains, of course, to be seen.
Original story published in adweek.com: "McAfee Overhauls Its Brand as AI Rewrites the Rules of Online Security"