Novo: Changing the Symbols Before the Strategy

This is episode 22 of Making Moves, a weekly mini-podcast where Ne-Lo co-founders Ross Hastings and Kieran Antill pick a company making an interesting strategic move and interrogate it. Unscripted, unedited, under 15 minutes. The Novo Nordisk episode was recorded on 18 September 2026.

This week: Novo Nordisk.

The rebrand, and what sits behind it

Novo Nordisk is now Novo. There is a shortened name, a significantly shifted visual identity, a new brand line in Lasting Health Starts Now, and a stated set of principles called The Novo Way: customer obsession, competitiveness, clarity, and care and integrity. The bull has been redrawn to face forward.

The backdrop is harder than the launch suggests. GLP-1 came out of diabetes medicine, where Novo and Eli Lilly were both dominant for a couple of decades. Novo moved first into weight loss, getting approval for a diabetes compound to be used for weight management roughly three years before Ozempic arrived. Ozempic then blew up, and the early mover advantage delivered enormous share.

Eli Lilly took years to respond, but when it did it came with what is widely regarded as the pharmacologically superior compound. Novo has been shedding share since. A follow-up product promised to beat Lilly's and did not, and the share price took the hit. There has been significant movement at executive level, including the CEO, which did not look anticipated from the outside. They have also been second to direct to consumer.

Two more things sit underneath all of it. Cheaper alternatives are entering and competing less on efficacy than on convenience. And in some markets the patents are running out, which brings generics and a category level disruption rather than a competitive one.

The analyst critique is blunt: a scientific company that stumbled into exceptional product market fit, took the share, and turned out not to be commercially sophisticated enough to defend it.

That is a little harsh. Entering weight loss was a deliberate, clear decision, taken after watching a diabetes drug get repurposed in public and on social media, and it required approval to pursue. They threw the first punch. The misstep is what came after. When the next product was not better, there was nothing to defend with.

The order is wrong

We do not like launching the brand before the strategy, and we rarely do.

The individual choices here are fine and defensible. Simplifying the name is sensible. Turning the bull to face forward is a reasonable piece of symbolism. But putting the identity out first makes the optics the first move, and it reads as a company trying to change everything at once. It says do not worry, we have changed our logo.

It also leaves the obvious question hanging. If the bull now faces forward, forward towards what? That answer is in the strategy, which has not landed yet.

The right sequence is the reverse. We believe this, we are making these decisions, and we have changed the symbols to reflect that. Symbols are a way to recall what a business is about. You have to work out how you will deliver on it first.

Competitiveness is not a value

The Novo Way has the same problem.

Care and integrity is table stakes. Find a healthcare organisation that does not claim it. Customer obsession and competitiveness are not cultural or behavioural values at all, they are outcomes. You do not become competitive by declaring you are competitive and watching share return. You get the strategy right, build the culture, hire the right people, and competitiveness is what comes out the other end.

These read less like a description of who the business has been and more like a set of rules for who it intends to be from now on. Those rarely stick.

Clarity is the interesting one, because it is the only one you could actually build behaviour around. Bezos is the obvious reference, with the memos and the written decks replacing presentations. A real culture of not saying in ten pages what could be said in one would be worth having, and handled properly it would feed the competitiveness they have listed separately. Clearer, more focused, quicker to move. Worth watching whether it shows up in the strategy or stays on the values slide.

When the comparison is this tangible

Pharma makes this unusually exposed. In most categories you can argue your way through a product gap. How many hours a week does one collaboration tool save against another? Nobody really knows, so claims do a lot of work.

Here it is ten per cent body weight over eight weeks against seven per cent. That is not a claim, it is a number, and it settles the argument before marketing gets a turn.

Which is why, once a competitor matches or beats your science and you cannot advance yours, you get dragged into a conversation you were never built for. It stops being about efficacy and becomes price, side effects, and convenience. Seventeen pills a day or one a week. In pharma the moat was always the patent, and that is precisely what is now expiring.

The wider pattern

There is a related thread worth pulling. Plenty of businesses end up with a name built by scientists or engineers rather than for a market. ChatGPT is the obvious current example, a name that cannot have been chosen expecting it to end up in everyday conversation. Viagra started as something else entirely before it found its real use.

What happens next is always the same. The thing becomes well known, and the company has to work out how to be comprehensible to people who are not subject matter experts. The harder your product is to explain, the harder everything else has to work. That is why so many of these companies eventually reposition towards simplicity, and it is a reasonable read of why Novo Nordisk became Novo.

The takeaway is the sequencing, though. Launching a refreshed brand to announce you are more modern does nothing on its own. Nobody cares. What works is making clear decisions and changing the symbols to reflect them, in that order.

Making Moves is a weekly mini-podcast from Ne-Lo, Australia's repositioning consultancy. New episodes every Friday.