Sneak Preview Of Our New Brand: Fosfo

Introducing our new brand… fosfo! We’re sharing a sneak preview with you now, as we’ll be converting our website address, logo, color scheme and other goodies to the new brand in the weeks ahead. Check out the draft logo shown here and let us know what you think! We’ll be refining that too. Huge kudos to our volunteer designers, whose dedication and creativity made this exciting transition possible! 

What about Citizens Market? Citizens Market will remain the formal legal name of our nonprofit organization, while Fosfo will increasingly become our public face, through our website, social media pages, mobile phone applications and so on. We know many of you are fond of the name “Citizens Market,” and we are too! “Citizens Market” sums up our mission neatly, expressing the idea that citizen-consumers can and should drive the marketplace. But “Citizens Market” is a mouthful of two fairly long, dry, abstract words. Not much punch or sizzle there! We decided we need a bold, memorable, evocative brand to more effectively engage people and build our community. 

Why Fosfo? Our team put a lot of thought and energy into this. Ultimately we decided that our brand should reflect a core motif of “light,” which is aligned with the main themes of our organization:

• Consumer ethics and enlightenment 
• Corporate transparency 
• Aggregation of many small parts (photons / reviews) into a transcendental whole (light / scores) 
• Speed, convenience and technology 

We then created a new brand name – “fosfo” – that allows us to build on ideas, words, colors and images associated with light, specifically phosphorescence. The word “fos” is Greek for “light.” 

We’re already finding it much easier – and much more fun – to engage our stakeholders with our new name. For example, we can use the metaphor of light to describe our crowdsourced review model as lots of bits of light that collectively illuminate and transform corporate behavior. We can convert bland, abstract terms like “Company Score,” “Peer Rating” and “Contributor Score” into our own fresh vocabulary: “foscore,” “fosfluence”, “fotons” and so forth. With tongue firmly embedded in cheek, we can rib our users as “fosfolks” and recognize our core information contributors as “The Fosse.” 

Our work here is serious. Climate change, corporate lobbying, child labor and all the other social and environmental issues we cover are no laughing matter. But we simply can’t afford to take ourselves too seriously. In order to change corporate behavior, we need to build a critical mass of consumers using our tools. And in order to engage consumers, we need to build a critical mass of information on our website. In order to engage people to join our community and share information on corporate behavior, we need to be bold, lively and even playful. It may always be a struggle to strike the right balance in our tone; we look forward to hearing your thoughts about it! 

Stay tuned as we roll out the new brand in the weeks ahead….