Cars.com, a top-3 U.S. automotive site, is marking its 25th anniversary with a comprehensive rebrand, including a redesigned logo and a new tagline.
The rebrand includes:
- A refreshed brand campaign following the theme “possibilities,” which is aimed at encouraging consumers to think of car shopping as fun and often spurred by life changes.
- A new catch phrase, “Where to next?” referring to the opportunities unlocked by a new vehicle.
- A logo update that replaces the old, three-dimensional one with a flat, transparent one, which the company says underlines its focus on fostering trust and confidence.
“As we celebrate our 25th anniversary, our new brand positioning and logo reflect an important inflection point for Cars.com,” Jennifer Vianello, the company’s chief marketing officer, wrote in an announcement.
“We are proud of our heritage as an original dot-com company and search engine for automotive and have evolved into a comprehensive platform of possibilities for car buyers and sellers.”
Cars.com launched in 1998 as a joint venture to digitize car classifieds from news groups, including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. The idea of creating a third-party online classified site for car dealers was ahead of its time.
Publicly traded since 2017, Cars.com remains one of the most popular and profitable automotive sites in the U.S., though it faces fierce competition from CarGurus (the market leader by traffic), CarFax and Cox Automotive’s Autotrader.com and KBB.com.