Beautiful rebrand. Wrong problem
Intuit’s new identity is gorgeous. It still can’t make Mailchimp and Credit Karma belong together.
JKR and Intuit’s in-house team made something beautiful. It’s sitting on a positioning problem no design system can fix.
Intuit just rebranded.
Jones Knowles Ritchie designed the identity alongside Intuit’s in-house team, Brand New reviewed it under the headline “I’m Into It,” and, on the craft, I’m into it... too.
The new wordmark is friendlier, the little “i” shorthand is clever, especially as a mascot of sorts, and the campaign work is drop-dead gorgeous.
I still think it’s a weird decision.
What it shows is that you can design one of the most beautiful identities in the world, and if the positioning doesn’t make sense, it falls flat anyway. All of those visuals need a core message to hang on, and Intuit doesn’t have one.
So, what does Intuit actually do?
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. Intuit owns TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp. Two of those make sense together. Two of them don’t.
The homepage says Intuit is “Your AI and expert team for financial confidence.” Click over to the business tab and you get QuickBooks, Intuit Enterprise Suite, and then Mailchimp, promising to help you “make confident marketing decisions.”
What does email and SMS have to do with financial confidence? Email can help drive revenue, sure, but nobody sits down to write a campaign the way they sit down to plan their finances, and you know I've got some expertise here because I have zero fun going over finances and I have a lot of fun going over marketing. They are completely different business goals and tools business owner is looking for. (And marketing is a lot more than email and SMS, but that’s a different newsletter.)
Then there’s Credit Karma, which is personal loans, credit scoring, and credit cards. There isn’t a single thing on it for a business. It’s the black sheep of a family full of red-headed step children.
You can see it the second you click through
Mailchimp feels nothing like Intuit. Typography, layout, color, imagery, illustration, icons, all of it. And a lot of what made Mailchimp exciting before the acquisition, the illustration and the personality their previous branding agency, Collins, built around Freddie in 2017, is exactly what got stripped down.
QuickBooks pulls in a little more of the new type, but it’s still a long way from the photography-forward Intuit site. Meanwhile Credit Karma and TurboTax were both still running the old wordmark when I clicked through, which is a poor rollout choice for a multi-billion dollar brand trying to look like it's got a handle on problems like finance.
And the product icons? The only thing tying them together is that each one sits inside a circle.
None of that is a knock on JKR. Working with what they were handed, the work is beautiful. But this is a positioning problem, and you don’t fix a portfolio that’s pulling in four directions with a good design system. You just make the chaos prettier.
Where the parent brand actually earns its spot
There is one real connection in here. If you do your books in QuickBooks, filing your business taxes in TurboTax should be a no-brainer. That’s a suite, and I’d happily put the Intuit name across the top of it.
Mailchimp and Credit Karma don’t belong in that suite, and stretching one brand over all four is a brand extension that doesn’t extend. I’d rather Intuit had gone the Alphabet route: let the parent sit quietly in the background and spend the money making each brand underneath it stronger on its own.
It’s like trying to serve one dinner made of pizza, cheeseburgers, tacos, and sushi. You can plate them on matching dishes, but nobody is eating that as one meal. It looks as gross as it sounds.
Funny enough, one of our clients brought us Intuit as a reference recently. I pointed out that they’re the opposite case: every product they sell ladders up to the same mission, they just get there in different ways.
There is no path between your personal credit score, email open rates, and financial success that one product suite can do well.
If your products don’t share a reason to exist together, let them be separate meals, and invest in each one.
No amount of awesome branding is going to make that easier to understand.
Kudos to JKR on some really incredible asset creation... I wish Intuit had the same precision with their portfolio strategy.
— Zach
