Shaking up the insurance broking market
McGill and Partners
Brand Digital Experiences UK
Shaking up the insurance broking market
McGill and Partners is a brand new boutique insurance broker. It was built from the ground-up by several highly experienced insurance veterans who saw their industry being held hostage by its own history, and decided to create a new firm fit for 21st-century broking – meaning digital-first, culturally progressive, and completely unlike anything else on the market.
Instead of trying to be all things to all sectors, McGill and Partners is focused on being exceptional in very niche areas for a highly select group of clients. It therefore needed a brand identity that not only has the built-in flex to grow with it, and also deliver a powerful statement at launch about how unlike any other firm it is.
Impact
3months to develop a truly unique new brand
20k+ website visitors in the first six months
Gold award wins for both brand design and website
Insight
All the other brokers on the market look as though they shop at the same store, so we knew we could make McGill and Partners stand out, but how do we show what it stands for?
The key was in recognising that the new firm views itself as a ‘respectful disruptor’. McGill and Partners is newly fit for purpose in a fast-moving world, whilst also carrying forward the best qualities of its industry, so we set out to create a campaignable identity that both acknowledges the past and faces the future.
Idea
We created a confident and definitive brand with a bold visual language, a distinctive palette of green, grey and white, a dramatic and expansive photographic style, and an iconic but understated logotype.
We distilled the McGill and Partners brand purpose into a key phrase ‘Write the book’. This speaks to its agenda-setting ambition to guide the industry in a new and better direction, as well as the high-calibre talent it wants to attract going forwards.
With a highly differentiated tone and appearance, we helped McGill and Partners to stand out immediately and make a lasting impact with both external and internal audiences.
Innovation
The flexibility of our identity allowed us to develop campaign assets during its launch year – including social posts, sales collateral, video identities, and a series of front-page ads for the Financial Times – without having to worry about the business quickly outgrowing the brand.
With only three months to develop and launch the McGill and Partners brand, we helped set them apart straight away with an intuitive one-page website that gave prospective clients the opportunity to form a fast impression of the new broker on the block.
“We're delighted with the brand Earnest created - both in terms of the result and the speed in which they worked - and the feedback both internally and from customers has been overwhelmingly positive.”
“Earnest told us that if we didn't feel slightly uncomfortable then we were probably like everyone else - so we followed their advice and went for something different and are delighted with the outcome.”
