Art Director
Designer
Paul Bailes
Client
Lloyd’s Market Association
Date
October 2020
Deliverables
Brand Foundations
Brand Identity
Print Design
Digital Design
Brief
Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA) represents the interests of the Lloyd’s community providing professional and technical support to their membership. The membership consists of managing and member agents at Lloyd’s of London and LMA represents their interests in decisions that effect the market.
LMA undertook an exercise to re-define their purpose, mission and strategy to ensure they remain relevant to their members and the larger insurance marketplace. This work identified some clear action points that would deliver this, at the heart of which was to rebrand the organisation, signalling their intent and ambition in moving the organisation forward.
Cohesion was engaged for this task and worked with the LMA Communications team to develop the brand and visual identity with the objectives of:
- Continuing to build the reputation of LMA
- To be considered a respected thought leader
- Development of brand advocates for their service.
- To be relevant to the industry and wider society.
Defining the brand proposition
Before you can tell the world why it is you do what you do, you need to first know why. Once this is known, foundations for the brand can be defined that will inform the visual identity.
Think
Working with the LMA Comms Team, a steering group was established and a collaborative process undertaken to define the brand foundations. These foundations fleshed out a collective agreement of shared values, personality and purpose. This was all wrapped up in the brand proposition “Facilitating a better future”. This vital work provided a benchmark against which the proceeding creative work could be measured.
Design
Core to any organisation is a symbol behind which it can unite. This was the first part of the design process and having defined the brand foundations, we were able to ensure a symbol was designed that had real meaning for the organisation, reflecting its purpose. Defining a colour pallet and visual language followed providing a blueprint for the creation of the marketing comms that would deliver the brand messages.
Create
During this phase brand touch-points were designed providing a consistent and coherent experience of the brand. Marketing comms from corporate stationery, PPT templates, email templates to office signs, event displays and product brochures.
A key element of the rebrand was to redesign the website, providing better opportunities for brand messages to be shared and giving more focus to thought leadership.
Designing the brand
When you know your purpose it is easier to agree upon a symbol that helps the world understand. As individuals we are all moved by colour, so using the right shades is important in getting the right response.
Identifying sub brands
Many organisations have services they want to raise above others – often referred to as sub brands. What is key is to do this in a way that does not undermine the brand as a whole and that also ensures your customers can understand the whole.
Experiencing the brand
Brands are often experienced away from a brochure or a website, be this an event, an interior or simply holding a pen in your hand. Consistency of visual language is key.
Outcome
Our work with LMA has established not only a new brand identity that better reflects the values and aspirations of the organisation but has embedded and understanding of the building blocks on which a brand stands and that are used as the benchmark for the brand, the way it looks and the way it communicates. This is vitally important if a brand is to be both coherent and authentic.
“Cohesion’s logical and patient approach worked well in consolidating a number of diverse viewpoints internally and resulted in great brand foundations that underpinned the rest of the process. Their brand expertise combined with a good understanding of the insurance sector meant that our brand launch was both understood and warmly received by our members. We were particularly impressed with Cohesion’s flexibility and problem solving approach to fit the LMA’s needs and the passionate dedication of the team to always push further for the best possible outcomes. This, our first experience of working with Cohesion, was really enjoyable and productive; we have since identified other projects that we look forward to working together on in the coming year.”
James Milne
Head of Communication, Lloyd’s Market Association