When Cari Watson (pictured) started her new job as senior vice-president, marketing and client experience at Westland Insurance Group back in January 2020, it’s safe to assume she – much like the rest of the world – had no idea how eventful the following year and a half would be.
Not that she and her team would let anything minor like a global pandemic slow them down – indeed it’s been much the opposite, with the team going full throttle into a rebrand.
“We’re so excited about it,” she said, referring to the recent rebranding of the Surrey, BC-based firm.
“It came from a client experience perspective. I was looking through how we described ourselves, and it didn’t really match what I had experienced at Westland. We feel that we have a really special culture, one where everyone is excited about the company and the nicest people you can meet, very client-focused and collaborative.”
After deciding that how the company described itself internally wasn’t capturing the essence of what made Westland special, Watson and her team got straight to work, doing customer surveys and internal focus groups to get at the heart of what Westland meant to them.
Given what she had experienced in her time there, what they found didn’t surprise her that much.
“One of the elements that we really feel distinguishes us is our approachability,” Watson said. “Just that genuine sense of caring and like you’re talking to a friend that you can trust when you talk to one of our advisors.
“I feel a lot of companies will say they are all about their people and their clients and their communities, and Westland really lives that.”
Now, Westland has unveiled a new logo and national brand designed to celebrate the company’s current path of accelerated growth, new faces and new ideas to change the status quo, and the ongoing focus and commitment to the communities Westland serves.
And as part of that commitment, it also announced it is making $1 million available in 2021 to support programs and initiatives in communities across the country where the brokerage has a presence.
The Westland Amplifying Communities initiative is primarily intended to support projects or programs that focus on wellness and mental health, equality and inclusion, homelessness and food insecurity, while also promoting opportunities for employee engagement and volunteerism in conjunction with local partnerships.
Watson said the initiative was a natural outgrowth of the commitment to volunteerism that Westland has shown since its founding in 1980, and they deliberately cast a wide net in terms of qualifications to be as respectful as possible to the specific needs of each individual community.
“As we grow nationally, we want to make sure we don’t lose sight of what made each of the brokerages that joined Westland effective in terms of having that local community,” she said.
“We’re really pleased to be able to do this, in particular at this time. We know with COVID some government budgets are a little tight and some businesses maybe aren’t able to give like they used to, and so we’re really pleased to be able to, as much as possible, fill that gap to make sure that the important work that community organizations do can continue.”
