Agency / Omelet — Client / Guardian — Integrated Campaign — 2018
How does a company founded in the 19th century compete in the 21st?
Brand Positioning — Research Management — Creative Strategy — Audience Strategy — Brand Tracking
For the first time in over 150 years, Guardian was in the process of building a consumer facing brand, essentially from scratch. A core component of the brief was simply figuring out where to start. For us, that meant recognizing the sheer enormity of the challenge of stealing share from some of the oldest, most trusted, and highest spending brands in the world.
A deep discovery process with employees and agents revealed the core truth of Guardian. This wasn't a company of mascots and College Gameday — this was a company defined by earnestness. Audience research — comprised of an exhaustive quantitative exercise with MRI-Simmons and Deloitte, as well as follow-up qualitative research — validated the strength of that brand archetype. As long as financial insecurities lingered, honesty and emotion would always play in the financial services market, which mattered not only for the B2C audience but the external brokers who drive so much of the business as well.
With a modernized look from our partners at The Working Assembly, amplifying associations of trustworthiness and accountability through shapes interlocked in an infinite loop, the campaign unveiled emotional real stories of customers and their Guardians, accompanied by a robust internal rollout of the new identity including office signage and more.
Employees stated a heightened sense of pride and shared identity, the benefits of which the company will see unfold for years to come. But the results went beyond the anecdotal. The nature of financial services demands direct media competition every year with the biggest spenders in the country, and in spite of this, Guardian still hit awareness benchmarks established in pre-campaign rounds of brand tracking.
Creative team: Tiffani Harcrow, Brianna Lohr + CDs: Chelsea Kauth, Florian Bodet + Account: Eliza Wan, Anthony Fernandez + CSO: Pete Talaba + CEO: Thas Naseemuddeen + Strategist: Christine Sasaki + Comms: Alex Heide + many more — please shout if I've been a jerk and left you off here!
