In October 2007, Lloyds TSB Registrars became Equiniti following its purchase by Advent International from Lloyds TSB Group. Equiniti is the UK’s leading share registration and employee share plan provider and under the Lloyds TSB name, it was part of a widely known, respected and trusted brand. Following the purchase, the company embarked on a full re-brand to develop a new identity and company name, while at the same time continuing to maintain the company’s reputation for being a quality service provider and market leader in the share registration and employee share plan sector.
Before we embarked on the re-brand we bought in two agencies to help create the name, brand positioning and creative treatment. Having an outside perspective brings fresh insight and the creativeness needed to develop the new brand. Working with Interbrand to devise a company name and review the brand positioning, we wanted something that was abstract but that could be registered globally, as we do not know where our future growth could take us.
Interbrand came up with a short list of three possible names for the business and we put it to an employee vote. As with any change to the brand, it is important that employees are part of the process, after all they will be the ones who will be using the name when meeting with clients and promoting our products and services. From the start, we made sure our employees were fully engaged in the process. More than 50 per cent of employees voted for the Equiniti name. We also held a series of road-shows and staff forums explaining what the changes meant to the business and allowing staff to ask questions.
The other agency we worked with was Daemon Spinner, our design agency, who handled all of the creative work around the logo and brand identity, including our marketing collateral. When designing a new identity it is imperative that the logo and colours communicate how you want the company to be perceived. Our logo was designed with this in mind and the final design communicates a confident brand, with its distinctive red conjoined E’ device and capitalised logo announcing an assured brand that was very distinct from our Lloyds TSB heritage.
As a new company having just broken away from a heritage brand and with a name that as of day one was going to have very little brand equity we had to choose a visual treatment that was going to create impact. Within our market space, as we’re dealing with intangible products, competitor collateral tended to follow the usual generic business imagery’ route. We decided therefore that we needed to create something that would have good recall, make an impact and stand out from the competition. The solution was to create a very specific visual style, with abstract red imagery on a black background – this allowed us to achieve great stand-out in all our collateral and reinforced our confident, market leading positioning.
This confident, innovative approach, combined with suitable sponsorship and advertising has taken the Equiniti name from a standing start to being universally recognised amongst our traditional B2B target audience in a very short space of time. We have also managed to emphasise our existing strengths around client service and reliability and enhance that message to better illustrate our market leading positioning.
From going through this process, we have learnt a number of do’s and don’ts when breaking away from a heritage brand and developing a new brand identity.
Do:
- Make sure that the senior management team are onside – without their support it will be difficult to engage with the wider audience and it is important to have senior executives aligned to the brand
- Communicate with all employees at every stage – internal communication is a huge part of any re-brand, especially when taking a company forward without the well-known brand behind it that people have come to trust and respect over the years
- Plan the implementation to the smallest detail – always be prepared and plan, plan, plan. It is important that every detail is taken into consideration from how your new name will translate in other languages to what images you will use on marketing collateral.
Don’t:
- Be afraid to challenge the status quo – moving away from a heritage brand provides the opportunity to take a fresh look at what you are trying to achieve strategically. It allows the company to be more expressive with its identity and to create something new and fresh
- Rush the process – Rushing means that you are more likely to overlook certain details, miss out on part of the consultation and end up creating issues with stakeholders that you hadn’t necessarily thought of
- Be put off by other people’s fear of change – change can be a very positive process and by engaging with people from the early stages, they are more likely to be open to new ideas.
