Xerox updates its stodgy image with a more colorful look

As ironic as this might sound for a document imaging company, Xerox Corp. is attempting to revamp its own image this week by launching a new logo and a friendlier, more colorful look across all of its marketing materials.

Although the changes wrought by the multimillion dollar rebranding initiative might seem superfical to some, other observers think an image overhaul is truly needed to help the "human" qualities of Xerox -- and its long-time spirit of innovation -- shine through, especially to consumers and small businesses.

As of now, Xerox's 14-year-old logo -- a mosaic "X" adorning the word "XEROX" in all caps, using the typeface the company had employed since the 1960s -- has been supplanted by a lowercase version.

The new logo, some might say, seems like it would accompany some social networking Web site -- since some of those should begin with "X" anyway -- than that of a multi-national corporation whose name preceded Google as the first to be inducted as its own verb.

The livelier logo will undoubtedly show up on Xerox's Web pages, as well as in print, broadcast, and interactive presentations, since the company is also planning a total overhaul of all its marketing materials over the next few years, featuring the use of more color.

But indeed, color and digital printing are at the heart of Xerox's growth strategy, says Irina Logovinsky, a financial analyst at Morningstar.

Due to the ongoing explosion in production volumes of graphic-rich Web pages and print documents, Xerox has been able to leverage its heritage in color printing, a market Logovinsky estimates as about five times more profitable than black-and-white printing due to the need for color printing supplies. Xerox's growth in the commercial printing market has been especially strong.

In its core market of corporate document production, however, Xerox stands out from the pack on the basis of its solid services arm. Xerox's services arm comes up with strategies designed to make document production more efficient and less costly.

In fact, although the trend of "green computing" is just coming to the fore today, Xerox has been encouraging elements of conservation and environmentalism among its customers since long ago, by advocating "full duplex" printing -- which uses both sides of the paper -- and remote administration of multiple hardware imagine devices, for example, said Patricia Calkins, Xerox' VP of environmental affairs, during a recent appearance at an industry conference held at the United Nations.

Yet also in the digital hardware market, Xerox is being met by increasing competition from Canon, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba -- and as some see it, these three companies seem much more accessible to members of the general public, because of their high visibility in the consumer electronics space.

Meanwhile, Xerox's track record with SMBs has been uneven until quite lately, according to Logovinsky. But Xerox is making changes there, too. Last year, Xerox acquired Global Imaging Systems, a company with a customer base of 200,000 SMBs. And this is a market that can also prove quite profitable, since SMBs lack the bulk purchasing capabilities of large corporations.

Meanwhile, although many people might not know this, Xerox is also a big player in enterprise content management (ECM) software -- and its DocuShare product in this category is well regarded by many industry analysts.

DocuShare offers "competitive document management, document imaging, and records management functionality," according to a recent report by Forrester Research.

"These ECM capabilities -- combined with team collaboration and eLearning support -- offer enterprises an intriguing, low-cost, highly functional option for business content initiatives."

But then, underneath its usually rather dull appearance, Xerox has actually been innovating right along. During the early 1960s, for instance, Xerox's PARC laboratory was an active developer of the pioneering Smalltalk programming language -- and a bunch of PARC's employees got lured away to Apple.

PARC was also the first organization to adopt the mouse. Back in 1964, Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues settled on the mouse for use across PARC, after also experimenting with a variety of other input devices. Some of those others, including the joystick, also made it into mass marketing history eventually.

So, Xerox's new marketing initiative seems well worth millions of dollars spent, if it shakes the company free of public misperceptions. And it looks as though the new logo and marketing materials just might just give a major boost to the bottom line, too.