MSD Animal Health Brand Guidelines: Intervet’s Boxmeer Roots & a 2011 Name

A feed maker’s vaccine business in Boxmeer.

MSD Animal Health is the animal health business of Merck & Co., the American drugmaker known as MSD outside the United States and Canada. The name dates from 29 June 2011, when the division, then called Intervet/Schering-Plough Animal Health, said it would use the name Merck Animal Health in the US and Canada and MSD Animal Health elsewhere, dvm360 reported that day. Its roots lie in three older businesses: Intervet in the Netherlands, the animal health arm of Schering-Plough in the United States, and Merck’s own veterinary work.

Intervet began in Boxmeer, in the Dutch province of North Brabant. Dutch Wikipedia, citing a company history by H. Nusteling that covers the years from 1949/50 to 2000, says it was founded in the 1950s by Wim Hendrix, a feed manufacturer in Boxmeer whose firm is now called Hendrix UTD: vaccines for chickens had been developed, and Hendrix saw that healthy animals also ate his feed. The company today places Intervet’s start in the 1940s. Around 1965 Intervet was taken over by Koninklijke Zwanenberg Organon, the Dutch pharmaceutical group that later became part of Akzo Nobel, Dutch Wikipedia says. The company says Intervet developed the wormer fenbendazole in the 1970s and the Porcilis Porcoli pig vaccine in the 1980s.

The American side goes back further. The company says Merck set up an animal health division in the 1940s and published the first edition of The MSD Veterinary Manual in the 1950s. Schering-Plough’s lineage began with the American subsidiary of Germany’s Schering AG: after the United States entered the Second World War in 1941 its assets were seized and became the Schering Corporation, held under government administration until 1952 and then sold to private owners, English Wikipedia says. The Schering Corporation merged with Plough, Inc. in 1971.

Two mergers, one division.

The present business was assembled in two steps. In 2007 Schering-Plough bought Organon BioSciences — Organon, Diosynth and Intervet — from Akzo Nobel, English Wikipedia says; Dutch Wikipedia dates the announcement to 11 March 2007 and completion to November that year. Before the sale, Dutch Wikipedia says, Intervet was the third-largest maker of veterinary medicines in the world as a unit of Akzo Nobel, with about 5,300 staff in more than 50 countries, and by far the largest employer in Boxmeer. The combined animal health business traded as Intervet/Schering-Plough Animal Health, and the company says HomeAgain, a pet microchip and recovery service, came with it into Merck. In November 2009 Merck merged with Schering-Plough. A planned merger with Merial, the animal health venture Merck had formed with the forerunner of Sanofi in 1997 and sold to Sanofi in 2009, was called off in March 2011, dvm360 reported.

In January 2012 the business said it would centralise most commercial, marketing and headquarters functions at Merck’s campus in Summit, New Jersey, The Poultry Site reported, while biological research and a large manufacturing operation would stay at Boxmeer, which was expected to keep about 1,700 employees. The company says Boxmeer housed the animal health headquarters until 2012.

The range covers pets, farm animals, poultry and fish. Its named brands include Nobivac vaccines for dogs and cats, Porcilis vaccines for pigs, and Bravecto, a parasiticide range for dogs and cats that the company says first won US FDA approval as a chewable tablet for dogs. On 1 April 2019 Merck completed its purchase of Antelliq from funds advised by BC Partners, bringing the Allflex Livestock Intelligence, Sure Petcare and Biomark brands into Merck Animal Health as an operating unit, according to Merck’s announcement. The company says it has since opened a plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for identification ear tags and markets SenseHub monitoring for cattle.

Vets, farms and vaccines.

Animal health companies speak to several audiences at once: veterinarians in clinics, farmers and producers, and the owners of dogs and cats. Their imagery tends to follow those audiences. A vet examining a dog or a cat on a consulting-room table is one of the most familiar scenes, alongside cattle in a barn, pigs in a pen and flocks of poultry, often shown with the people who look after them.

The products themselves are less photogenic, so the same few objects recur: vaccine vials, syringes, blister packs of tablets, spot-on pipettes and collars, along with laboratory benches, protective clothing and production lines. Many companies in the sector make both medicines for pets and vaccines for livestock, and their websites usually split the range by species rather than by product.

The sector also meets its customers in person. Trade fairs and congresses such as the VMX veterinary conference in Orlando and the World Veterinary Congress are where companies launch products, run booths and sponsor talks, and their stands carry much of the same photography of animals, clinics and farms.

Many of these companies also present themselves through the idea of One Health, which links the health of people, animals and the environment, and through the language of independence, family control or shared ownership where it applies. Ceva, for example, uses the slogan “Together, beyond animal health,” while Virbac points to the family that still controls it. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it and where it works.

One division, two names.

The two names follow the parent. Merck & Co. is known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, as its own announcements note, and its animal health division mirrors that split: it runs merck-animal-health.com for North America and msd-animal-health.com for the rest of the world, with the same text on both. Both carry the line “The Science of Healthier Animals,” which the company calls its mission, and both say the business operates in more than 150 countries. The website also claims a heritage of more than 130 years, which it attributes to MSD as a whole.

The company says its teams include veterinarians, farmers and caregivers, and it tells its history on its website as a decade-by-decade list of product approvals and launches, with older entries credited to Intervet or to Schering-Plough Animal Health. Boxmeer remains part of that story: in 2012 the business described the town as a pivotal part of its global strategy, The Poultry Site reported.

For a design guide, MSD Animal Health shows how one division can carry two names, set by its parent, while keeping a single message. Compare Zoetis, which began as Pfizer’s animal health business, and Boehringer Ingelheim, another drugmaker with a large animal health arm. For this guide we use a deep navy, a leaf green and a cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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