Health insurance giant WellPoint has cast off its 2004 merger-acquired name and re-rebranded itself as Anthem Inc.
The name change, completed by the time the sun went up today, was a complicated affair. It required shareholder approval, done in November, and entailed changing the publicly traded company’s stock ticker from WLP to ANTM, creating a new website (antheminc.com) and, of course, hoisting new lettering over the entrance to its Monument Circle headquarters.
This is the second time the company has rebranded itself as Anthem. When the insurer moved into its Monument Circle headquarters in 1991, it was known as Associated Group. The Anthem name came later, followed by WellPoint, the name of the larger California-based insurer that Anthem acquired for $20.8 billion in 2004.
The erecting of the Anthem name in blue letters on the headquarters comes almost exactly 10 years to the day that the WellPoint name went up.
The latest corporate rebranding is an attempt to return to a name that is more widely recognized by the public. The Anthem name remained in use even after 2004 by many of the company’s state affiliates, including in Indiana where the company sells its insurance under the name Anthem Blue Cross-Blue Shield.
Having a broadly recognized consumer moniker is more important to Anthem now because, under new federal health insurance regulations, the company is focusing more on sales to individuals rather than to employer groups as it did previously.
“We believe it is important to call ourselves by the name that people know us by best — Anthem,” company President and CEO Joseph Swedish says on a message on the renamed website today.
The WellPoint name will no longer be publicly used by the company, spokeswoman Gene Rodriguez said. Even the charitable WellPoint Foundation was renamed the Anthem Foundation, she said.
Internet users who try to go to the old wellpoint.com website are redirected to the new antheminc.com site.
The WellPoint name originated with Blue Cross of California officials in 1992 when that company went public. The name was meant to reflect “integration, integrity, strength and stability” and was not a reference to a wellpoint, which is a pipe driven into the soil to tap groundwater, a spokeswoman explained in 2004.
To remind one of its most constituencies of the name change, company leaders will ring the closing bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange today.
Date: December 3, 2014