Manila, 1834.

Ayala Corporation traces its start to a partnership in Manila. The Philippine Star, reporting on the group’s 180th year on 21 April 2014, quoted the company’s own history: the story began in 1834, when the landowner and entrepreneur Domingo Roxas and his young industrial partner Antonio de Ayala created a company to work in agribusiness. The business house was Casa Roxas, and, the newspaper said, it started in a two-storey wooden building in the Quiapo district of Manila and built a distillery to get more value from cane sugar.

That distillery is the link between the group and one of the drinks names on this site. Wikipedia says the enterprise began with the Ayala distillery, which produced Ginebra San Miguel, and that the distillery later passed to La Tondeña, the company owned by Carlos Palanca. The gin went on under other owners; the partnership that made it went on to become a holding company.

The group name came from the second partner. Wikipedia says the business was organised as Ayala y Compañía, Ayala and Company, in 1876, and gives that as the group’s former name. The banking side began early as well. The Philippine Star quoted Ayala’s history as saying that when a Spanish royal decree established El Banco Español-Filipino de Isabel II, Antonio de Ayala was appointed a director representing the Manila business community, and that the bank later became the Bank of the Philippine Islands, known as BPI.

The Zobel de Ayala family leads the group today, and the 2014 report quoted the company as saying that when the family’s assets were divided in 1914, the Makati property went to the cousins Jacobo, Alfonso and Mercedes Zobel de Ayala. That land, a hacienda on the edge of Manila, became the ground on which the modern group was built.

A hacienda, a colonel and a corporation.

The Makati land was developed under a husband who married into the family. The Philippine Star said in 2014 that Mercedes Zobel de Ayala’s husband, Col. Joseph McMicking, gave the group a new direction by developing what remained of the Ayala property, and quoted the company as saying that McMicking and his successors in management, Enrique Zobel and Jaime Zobel, steered the business through the twentieth century. Wikipedia places the urban development of Makati after the Second World War.

The legal form changed with the development. Wikipedia says the partnership Ayala y Compañía became a corporation with the establishment of Ayala Corporation in 1968, that Mitsubishi Corporation took a minority stake as a strategic partner in 1973 and 1974, and that the company became a public company in 1976. Its headquarters today, according to Wikipedia, are in Ayala Triangle Gardens Tower 2 in the Makati Central Business District.

Leadership passed within the family for generations. The Philippine Star reported on 29 September 2022 that Enrique Zobel became the group’s chief executive after the retirement of his uncle, McMicking, and that in 1984 Jaime Zobel de Ayala succeeded his cousin Enrique as chairman and president. Wikipedia says Jaime Zobel de Ayala stepped down as chairman at the annual stockholders’ meeting of 7 April 2006, when his elder son Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala became chairman and chief executive and his younger son Fernando Zobel de Ayala became president and chief operating officer.

The companies under the group keep their own names. Wikipedia lists Ayala Land, BPI, Globe Telecom and the energy business ACEN among its subsidiaries and affiliates. Each has its own identity, and Ayala said in 2004 that its subsidiaries and affiliates, including Ayala Land, BPI and Globe, would remain stand-alone strategic business units under the Ayala name.

A painter’s icon and a warm wordmark.

Across Asia, many business groups carry a single family name or a short set of initials over a wide spread of trades. The same word can sit above a department store, a bank branch, a mobile network, a housing estate and a shipping office, and the identity work is less about one product than about holding that name steady across very different places. A house flag or monogram, often older than any of the companies now beneath it, tends to do the heavy lifting: it turns up on ship funnels, annual-report covers, office lobbies and staff lanyards long after the original trading business has changed shape.

Property is where these identities become physical. A group’s name or mark placed on a tower, mall or estate turns architecture into signage, and renaming a building or a chain of malls is a brand decision made in full public view. Designers studying these names usually look at three things: how the parent mark sits beside the marks of the businesses it owns, whether a founder’s name or initials survive a rebrand, and how a colour or letterform stays recognisable at the scale of a skyline as well as on a receipt.

A refresh in 2004 and a handover in 2022.

Ayala has published its own account of its mark. In an announcement dated 1 March 2004, the company said it had decided to review its brand in 2003, ahead of its 170th year, and that it hired the Hong Kong-based consultancy Enterprise IG to structure the review. Members of the family and senior executives took part in brainstorming sessions, and employees joined focus groups.

The review kept the old symbol. Ayala said the icon it retained had been created by Fernando Zóbel, the painter, an uncle of Jaime Zobel de Ayala. The company described the icon as a stylised pair of double-line letters A interlocking at the centre: a single stylised A, the initial of the company’s name, drawn four times in blue in free space, with four straight white lines inside the blue that suggest movement towards or away from the centre. To that icon the 2004 refresh added a new wordmark, Ayala, in what the company called a warm colour tone, and a directional arrow derived from the icon for use in reports, advertisements and websites.

The refresh also shortened the name in daily use. The company said that, except in legal documents, it would no longer use its legal entity name, Ayala Corporation, and would be known simply as Ayala. It also said that the subsidiaries Ayala Land, BPI, Globe and AC Capital would remain stand-alone business units. The arrangement put one short word and a painter’s symbol above a set of companies that kept their own names.

Leadership moved outside the family in 2022. The Philippine Star reported on 29 September 2022 that Ayala had appointed Cezar “Bong” Consing as president and chief executive, following his appointment as interim chief on 15 August, succeeding Fernando Zobel de Ayala, who had become chief executive the year before. The newspaper noted that the top post had until then been held by members of the Zobel de Ayala family, and said Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala remained chairman of the company.

For a design guide, Ayala shows how a long-lived group can refresh its identity by keeping an artist’s symbol and changing only the words beside it. Compare SM Investments, another Philippine group whose companies trade under their own names, and Ginebra San Miguel, the gin that began at the Ayala distillery. For this guide we use blue, amber and night with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ayala Corporation’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.