Cencora Brand Guidelines: Brunswig, AmerisourceBergen & the 2023 Rename

A druggist’s apprentice and two wholesalers.

Cencora is a new name on an old business. English Wikipedia says the company was formed in 2001 by the merger of AmeriSource Health Corporation and Bergen Brunswig Corporation, and it traded for more than two decades as AmerisourceBergen. It is headquartered in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

The company’s own history page reaches much further back. It says Lucien Napoleon Brunswig began his career in 1871 as an apprentice to a druggist, and that by 1907, after several partnerships, the Brunswig Drug Company worked only in wholesale drug distribution. The company then grew through acquisitions and new markets over the following decades, it says.

The same page lists a run of technical firsts, which are the company’s own claims. It says the Brunswig Drug Company was the first US wholesale drug company to use computerised punch cards to track inventory, in 1947; that the Bergen Drug Company was the first company in America to use computers for inventory control and accounting, in 1959; and that by 1971 Bergen Brunswig had begun sending purchase orders electronically, which it says cut distribution time to 24 hours. On the other side of the family, it says Amerisource Health introduced an electronic ordering system for retail pharmacies, called AccuSource, in 1994, and that Bergen Brunswig built up specialty distribution services in the mid-1990s.

AmerisourceBergen, 2001 to 2023.

As AmerisourceBergen the company kept buying. Wikipedia lists the specialty courier World Courier, agreed in 2012; MWI Veterinary Supply in 2015, which the company says took it into animal health; and the wholesaler H. D. Smith in January 2018, which the company calls the largest independent wholesaler in the United States at the time. In June 2021 it bought Alliance Healthcare from Walgreens Boots Alliance, a long-standing partner, adding a large wholesale business outside the United States. Wikipedia also describes Good Neighbor Pharmacy, a retailers’ cooperative network of independently owned pharmacies that the company sponsors and whose name it owns; the network sponsors an annual trade show called ThoughtSpot. The tie to Walgreens ran deeper than one sale: in March 2016, Wikipedia says, Walgreens Boots Alliance announced it would exercise an option to buy AmerisourceBergen shares that would give it a stake of about 15 percent.

The company’s public record includes legal cases. In October 2018 AmerisourceBergen agreed to a civil settlement with the US government over a programme at subsidiaries that repackaged injectable cancer-support drugs into pre-filled syringes; the company had earlier been found guilty of a related misdemeanour charge, Wikipedia says. Like McKesson and Cardinal Health, it was also sued by states and local governments over shipments of prescription opioids. On 25 February 2022 the three distributors and Johnson & Johnson finalised nationwide settlements after enough state and local governments signed on, the Associated Press reported; Wikipedia notes that the companies did not admit wrongdoing.

During the pandemic the company had a public role as well. In June 2020, Wikipedia says, the Department of Health and Human Services agreed to work with state governments and AmerisourceBergen to allocate shipments of the antiviral remdesivir to American hospitals until the end of September that year.

How wholesalers present themselves.

Pharmaceutical wholesalers sit between the companies that make medicines and the pharmacies, hospitals and clinics that hand them out, so their public image is mostly an image of movement. The pictures these companies tend to show are long automated warehouse aisles, conveyor lines carrying plastic totes, and high racks of shelving, with staff in high-visibility vests picking orders between them. The aim of that imagery is to show scale and order rather than any single product.

The second recurring scene is the road. Fleets of liveried vans and temperature-controlled trucks carry the company name through towns and onto motorways and are often the most visible sign of a wholesaler on the street. Close-ups of insulated cold-chain boxes, data loggers and handheld barcode scanners carry the same message at a smaller size: goods are tracked from shelf to doorstep.

The third scene is the pharmacy counter. Because many wholesalers also run pharmacy networks, franchise banners or buying groups, their brochures often show a pharmacist behind a counter talking with a customer, which gives a logistics business a human face. These banners usually carry their own names and colours, separate from the parent company, so one wholesaler can stand behind several identities on the high street.

Beyond that, the visual record is corporate: trade-fair stands, investor presentations and annual reports with supply-chain diagrams of arrows linking factories, distribution centres and pharmacies. For a design study, the useful question is how one identity can work on a lorry side, a carton label, a pharmacy sign and a screen at the same time.

One name for a global group.

The new name was announced on 24 January 2023. In a press release that day AmerisourceBergen said it intended to become Cencora, that the name was inspired by customers and team members around the world, and that a shared identity would create a more inclusive experience for employees and a stronger employer brand. The company’s history page adds that the name was chosen from a pool of hundreds of possible names, and that the change brought Alliance Healthcare under the Cencora name as well.

The change was completed on 30 August 2023, when the company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker COR in place of ABC, Chain Drug Review reported that day. The company said the new name brought its 46,000 employees across several business segments under one identity. Its charitable foundation and its venture fund were renamed at the same time, becoming the Cencora Impact Foundation and Cencora Ventures. In January 2025, Wikipedia says, Cencora took a majority stake in Retina Consultants of America.

The company now says it supports pharmaceutical care in more than 50 countries, and its website groups its work into wholesale and specialty distribution, logistics and warehousing for drug makers, and services for pharmacies, practices and hospitals. Those are its own descriptions. Its history page says the company is building on a legacy of more than 100 years in pharmaceutical sourcing and wholesale distribution, and that it was established under the Cencora name in 2023 as a new name for AmerisourceBergen.

For a design guide, Cencora shows a company swapping a merger name built from its predecessors for a single coined name meant to cover every unit at once. Compare McKesson, which kept a founder’s name from the 1830s, and Walgreens, whose parent sold Alliance Healthcare to the company in 2021. For this guide we use a deep teal, a night ink and a soft sage with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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