UK insurance firm Norwich Union has shed its long-established brand identity to take on that of its parent company, Aviva. Max Hotopf found out how and why:

Sally Shire is the first to admit that the Norwich Union is one of those stalwart brands with huge recognition. Yet, at a time when financial services has become the butt of stand-up comedians, she is tasked with eliminating this trusted, familiar brand and replacing it with Aviva, a name invented for the group in 2002. Why?

To Shire, it all makes sense. “Some 60% of our sales are outside the UK, with many subsidiaries already trading as Aviva. We are the fifth largest insurer and the Aviva brand sends out that signal.” The move to Aviva is about creating one firm. “We want ideas to be shared within the company, for all employees to feel they are part of a single company,” she says. “It makes sharing best practice much easier. It also helps us hire the best managers.”

She also points to the cost of different brands: “They are expensive to maintain. Now we can go for international sponsorships. Our sponsorship of UK athletics will cost £50 million up to 2012. Partners like HSBC want global brands they can do business with. Using Aviva makes more sense.” Shire and Leigh Thomas, client services director at Aviva’s agency Abbott Mead Vickers (AMV), say the decision to change the UK name was only taken after a mass of research.

Seeking value
But you can’t help wondering whether Norwich Union’s fate wasn’t sealed with the appointment of Andrew Moss as chief executive in 2007. He immediately coined the phrase “one Aviva, twice the value.” The idea was meant to sum up the concept of getting more value out of the existing business and played well to all sorts of audiences, including the City.

Whatever the ins and outs, Aviva has deployed all the resources of a FTSE 100 company to ensure that the rebranding goes through smoothly. Thomas ays the decision was taken in late 2007 only after immense and thorough due diligence. AMV and Aviva assessed in great detail what managers in different business units thought of the change – what were the benefits, what were the pitfalls. The company also spent time on in-depth case-studies, researching how others have made similar changes. Shire says the lesson was to take your time: “HSBC got it right with the Midland Bank,” she says, “while Abbey National might have rushed the change to Abbey.”

Using focus groups, combing in-house knowledge and deploying its annual quantitative survey, Aviva set out from day one “to understand what consumers really want from a financial brand and what our employees want from Aviva as an employer.” The answer was that consumers want to receive individual recognition and employees want, firstly, to know that what they do makes a difference to the company and the customer and, secondly, to receive recognition for their work. Shire sums up the task as combining “the skills and expertise which we have in bucket-loads” with “a natural instinct to be helpful.”

A service company
But isn’t this is starting to sound distinctly fluffy? Aren’t insurance companies more associated with hard sales techniques? Shire suggests that things have moved on, pointing out that Aviva’s B-to-C business is conducted almost entirely through intermediaries, such as financial advisers and the web. “None of this is fluffy,” she says. “It makes sound business sense to meet customers’ needs and to gain that reputation, that word of mouth and to build our brand on that strength. People think of us as a service company today.”

Out of this research comes the stories of service, examples of how Aviva wants to behave. There is Bruce, the helpline healthcare insurance operative who was invited to the funeral of a client, even seated in the family car, because of the time he spentlistening to the customer’s problems in the weeks before she died. Or deluged Tewksbury. In response to the flooding, Aviva sent a battle bus of employees: “We didn’t wait to be asked to help,” says Shire.

It is not that Aviva really wants its call centre staff to spend hours on the phone to individual clients. More that Bruce shows how Aviva wants its staff to handle clients with empathy, to view them as individuals. Training has been put in place to ensure that staff “live the values”. And yet what is the outcome of all this research, this inspiration? Shire talks of forthcoming new TV adverts in February/March and May based on messages such as “We won’t see you as a target market” or “Remember whose money it is”. Is this really fresh and original? Surely all financial service giants adopt a similar approach?

Leigh Thomas at AMV acknowledges the danger of focusing on the relationship between the consumer and the company: “Yes, it is overtraded. Yes, financial services is a difficult industry. It is an audacious challenge. But brand is behaviour. For Aviva, it is taking the best of what they are, highlighting that and letting it blossom, taking it out from pockets of excellence.” This calls for cultural change, for a different approach to training and managing staff. It calls for international secondment programmes to show staff they really do work for a multi-national.

Spreading the word
Meanwhile, there was the task of communicating the name change. Here, too, Aviva did the research, holding a series of customer councils. Shire says that, unlike focus groups, “where you are stuck watching behind the one-way mirror”, Aviva staff were able to participate. Amongst other things, customers were asked precisely what they would want to be told in a letter about the name change.

Staff were invited to listen in to 1,000-strong conference calls with directors, followed by Q&A sessions backed up with websites. Shire says that there was relatively little resistance to the name change once the underlying rationale was fully explained. The rub was always going to be in the town of Norwich which has had a 300-year relationship with the firm. Here, she says, Aviva was fortunate to be able to pick up a sponsorship deal with Norwich City football club.

Aviva splashed out on A-list stars and eye-catching billboards as part of a £10 milllion advertising campaign

Some 3 million customers were sent the letter before Christmas. On Boxing Day a TV ad, reputedly costing £9 million, rolled starring Bruce Willis, Elle acpherson, Alice Cooper and Ringo Starr talking about how they had changed their names. You can see it and read the reaction from employees at YouTube. Expect intermittent but heavy advertising through to June when the name change goes official. Shire says the Norwich name will not, even then, be dropped entirely: “We’ll still say something like ‘Aviva, formerly Norwich Union’.”

Shire won’t reveal budgets, but they must stretch to several tens of millions of pounds. But the move is being followed with beady eyes by Aviva bean counters – word has it that the project has to pay back within five years.