Investing in a clearer brand identity for Punter Southall

Transforming financial futures

Punter Southall has been developing new ways to transform financial futures offering financial planning, employee benefits, pension and legal services since 1988.

The make-up of the Punter Southall Group has changed over the years through organic growth, mergers and joint ventures. The Punter Southall Group now consisted of a number of different companies working in complementary areas yet working in silos. This makes cross pollination across the Group difficult.

The Group came to Harrison Carloss with the challenge of bringing all of the companies under one brand rather than having a number of sub brands under the Punter Southall umbrella. The existing companies will then become service streams allowing them to work more fluidly and to cross sell across different areas of the business.

We worked alongside Punter Southall Group’s chosen research agency who gathered insights from market analysis, competitor audits and reviews of their customer base to analyse in workshops.

During these sessions, the Group’s agility and ability to adapt stood out as a unique selling point – and placed customer need at the centre of all the business activities, shaping the business around customers. From this key insight of being ’Intelligently agile’ was chosen as the organising idea. This helped inform the brand evolution further on in the project.

During the initial part of the branding project, research was also conducted to establish how best to structure the Punter Southall services in a clear and simple way for the end users.  The service structure needed to cover the breadth of services without outwardly reflecting the current confused structure of the Punter Southall Group.

The outcome of this was to group services into four core categories: Financial Planning, Employee Benefits, Pensions and Legal.

Creative audit

Harrison Carloss was tasked with evolving the Punter Southall brand identity as they position into one Punter Southall brand. As part of the project, Harrison Carloss conducted an audit to understand how the brand is represented visually across different on and offline collateral.

The outcome was a set of suggestions on how we can use or enhance existing brand elements and where there were gaps to add to the brand guidelines as part of the launch of ‘One Punter Southall’. We considered the use of logo, font, imagery, iconography, graphical elements and colour.

We also created a bold, dynamic and flexible design system which used geometric flat design to unite the Group’s companies, while allowing enough individuality to highlight the wide-ranging offerings.

Creative options

We presented three logo concepts to launch the new Punter Southall One:

An evolution of the existing brand: Updating the logomark to remove black and brighten the logo. The inclusion of teal colour provides a friendly, conversational feel. This simple change allows the logo remain distinctly Punter Southall.

A revolution of the existing brand: The previous story noted ‘customer need at the centre of all the business activities’. We evolved this idea using the new story by moving the dot to the centre of the logo mark creating a stronger connection between the shapes. Rotating the shape to point upwards implies positive connotations, such as pointing toward a positive future with Punter Southall. The introduction of the curve inspired by a positive graph compliments this idea of leading up to a better future.

Rebrand – A single, clean overlap within the logo shapes represents strong relationships internally between services and how Punter Southall work externally with their customers. The arrow (synonymous with Punter Southall) points upwards to demonstrate positive results and looking to the future. The circular shapes form around the arrow demonstrating shaping the business around customers.

Brand launch

Punter Southall decided to do an evolution of their existing brand logo and chose concept one. This was to maintain their current levels of brand awareness and equity as they are well known within the sector. We rolled out the brand to a set of extensive brand guidelines covering off the usage of logo, colours, pattern, icons and photography.

We also created a launch video to launch the new Punter Southall Brand at an event with their employee’s and clients. This video told the story of Punter Southall One and launched the first look of the new visual identity for the brand…

Read the full case study over on our website https://harrisoncarloss.com/projects/punter-southall/