My name is Misty Muscatel and as the Global Chief Marketing Officer at Circana, I drive multiple marketing and sales initiatives to align with the company’s growth strategies with the goal of accelerating demand, awareness, and ecosystem growth.

I lead the continuous evolution of corporate messaging, positioning and execution of the company's narrative in key marketing assets, including digital, presentations, campaigns, events, demos, sales enablement, and strategic communications. I’m laser-focused on pipeline generation, ensuring the company communicates the right message at the right time and in the right place to all target audiences.

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’s leading brands and retailers across almost every industry on how to identify opportunities, ignite innovation and achieve ongoing, sustainable growth. Through technology, analytics, and cross-industry data, Circana tracks millions of products spanning more than 2,000 categories across over 500,000 stores in 20 countries.

The company advises almost 7,000 brands and retailers globally in industries including consumer packaged goods, beauty, technology, food service and food consumption.

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’re incredibly honored and proud of all our hard work! The rebranding process itself created an open dialogue between the two heritage companies. Everyone had to come together and work through the many unknowns and this award is a symbol of our team effort and unity.

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’t happen often that an entirely new brand is created after a merger.

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’ acronyms stood for. The new name and logo couldn’t have been more perfect. The two “Cs” in Circana tie directly to our tagline “Complexity into Clarity” and our differentiator of enabling clients to “see the complete consumer.”

The logomark consists of six concentric circles that represent the complexity of today’s consumer data, our clients’ markets, and the general complexity of the world we live in. The wordmark emerges from the circles, reflecting that we are reinventing our business category and differentiating ourselves from competitors. The clarity dot after the wordmark symbolizes the ultimate clarity we achieve for clients as a result of embracing complexity.

Winning 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.