Challenging perceptions to attract unicorns

For an insurance group that serves over 2 million UK policyholders, the IT department is kind of a big deal. Attracting and retaining the very best team is essential, but the Covéa corporate brand was designed to appeal to a different audience and wasn’t communicating as strongly with tech talent and demonstrating the innovation within. We took them into a new space making them fearless and future-facing by asking, What’s Next?

The Challenge

Identity Crisis

Standing in its way was the perception that the insurance industry is not very innovative, tech savvy or forward thinking. Covéa’s corporate brand identity was not helping to attract unicorns with big ambitions. The IT department had a crisis of identity, it needing to overcome the image that this team just told you to turn your computer off and on again. Instead, it needed to stand for its missions to drive growth through innovation and attract the right talent to deliver it.

The Strategy

Hunger and passion for innovation

Our solution was to give the tech team an identity in its own right to help smash the negative perceptions and give a halo effect back to the Covéa corporate master brand.

We created an employee brand definition and cultural change strategy that worked within the existing Covéa framework building on the master brand core values. At the heart of this was our ‘What’s Next?’ brand point of view which characterises the hunger and passion for the future innovation and tech needed to help us achieve our goals.

To cut through and attract new talent while galvanising the existing internal audience we created an employee value proposition (EVP), a cultural change and launch programme, as well as a tone of voice guidelines and messaging matrices to help change perceptions internally and externally - reaching our demanding tech audience.

The identity needed to speak to several audiences from creative innovators to the analytical hardware and network specialists. From experienced experts to young graduates looking to start and exciting career.

The Design

Living, evolving symbol of change

The relentless momentum of ‘What’s Next?’ powers not just the Covéa Digital team but the whole organisation into the future:

“To be a business that is always adapting and changing as part of its DNA, working with people to create new ways of solving problems, creating the future, collaborating and changing insurance.”

The design solution embodied our ‘What’s Next? point of view, with a flexible, living icon that represented the attitude needed in their team to evolve and adapt to change, and also become the catalyst for change, failing fast, learning and growing again.

The Impact

Attracting, retaining, exciting

The new Digital team identity gave the tech department a compelling story to get behind, helping them to generate excitement for future talent as well as motivating the existing team. They were named as one of the Best Places to Work In Digital in 2020 and awarded Best Employer at the Yorkshire Financial Awards 2021. The team has boosted its recruitment rate with over 100 people attracted into digital roles in the tear since launch.

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extraordinary

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