You’ve heard of Mailchimp, TurboTax, Credit Karma, and Quickbooks; and chances are good you might even be able to picture their logos or recall a memorable ad. But what do you know about their parent company, Intuit? The most likely answer to that question (not much) is one of the main reasons that Intuit approached the branding agency Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR) a year and a half ago to rethink its identity. The brand has spent nearly a decade expanding into a broad financial tech platform. It acquired Credit Karma and Mailchimp in 2020 and 2021, respectively. It’s building new tools for accountants and small businesses. And it’s investing in both AI-powered and human experts to help users get more out of their product suite.  [Image: JKR/Intuit] Today, Intuit wants to become “one connected, AI-driven expert platform” rather than a collection of sub-brands. According to Tosh Hall, JKR’s chief creative officer, the problem ahead of the rebrand was that Intuit had no real identity of its own. One key question he remembers his team asking was, in the world of digital transformations for tech companies, Why is it all streamlined in a wind tunnel? Why is it all functional, neutral, frictionless, boring, invisible? “In some ways, Intuit fell into that trap, not only in the digital technology space, but also in the brand space,” Hall says. “I mean, no one had heard of Intuit.” Hall’s task, on paper, was simple: to take “something that’s invisible, and make people care about it.” His team’s solution boiled down to a single letter of the alphabet that’s designed to turn Intuit from a featureless corporation into a brand with a personality. [Image: JKR/Intuit] The remit: Making Intuit into a memorable brand Intuit’s specific brand conundrum is unique, but it’s facing a broad problem that many other SaaS companies are tackling in the AI era. As these software-as-a-service companies race to incorporate new AI-powered features and functions, their capabilities are outpaci

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