In conversation with Insurance Business earlier this year, group CEO of Open GI, Simon Badley (pictured) discussed the changes he was driving across the organisation as it seeks to modernise and innovate to meet changing consumer demands. Open GI’s strategy is not all that is transforming, as evidenced by the business’s introduction of a new, refreshed brand to the market.
“Changing our brand is another major milestone in this journey,” he said. “Our decision to refresh as opposed to rebrand is underpinned by our strong ambition to retain all the good elements of our history but also acknowledge that the future for Open GI requires a change in product leadership. Our focus is on delivering client and engineering excellence.”
In today’s market, brand experience is extremely important, he noted. How we, as consumers, interact with well-known brands every day affects whether we purchase a commodity or not. Brand experience and brand loyalty are at the heart of all businesses. For Open GI, the brand promise on which the business has been founded is central to everything it does for its customers.
Outlining the brand evolution journey of the business to date, Badley stated that conversations surrounding brand identity first started to emerge in 2019. The team wanted to explore more about what Open GI meant to others in the market, he said, and to understand how its customers and employees felt about the brand. A key question was whether a name change to the business might be necessary given the changes it had undergone in leadership.
To answer these questions, a brand audit was embarked upon and this lasted 12 weeks. During that time, he said, both primary and secondary research was conducted to generate a clearer understanding of where the business stood. The primary research engaged both employees and customers to gauge their viewpoints, and the feedback received was insightful enough to create a clear path forward.
“Quite quickly into the process, we learned our brand name – Open GI – holds a lot of loyalty and credibility,” he said. “It became evident to us that we didn’t need to rebrand, just refresh, and modernise. Following the completion of our audit in July 2019, through a series of consultations, we trialled a variety of new brand designs. The analysis from this trial guided us to select a brand favoured by both our employees and customers. Since the summer, the team has been embedding the brand internally in advance of launching it to market at the beginning of November 2020.”
Among the comments gathered during the brand audit, Badley noted that there was a lot of anecdotal quotes received from customers - but one that really caught the team’s attention was that the former Open GI branding looked more like it belonged to an insurance company than a software company.
“Our future ambition for our logo was for it to represent a SaaS-based company – but when we did the analysis our logo didn’t say this,” he said. “Our customers also explained that when it came to selecting a tech partner, they wanted that partner to look modern and vibrant. When we compared this commentary with our now old brand designs, we knew we had an opportunity to change and align ourselves closer to what the customer wanted.”
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Though the rebrand is still in its early stages, Badley stated he has been delighted by the initial response to the changes, and that the Open GI team has been thrilled with how the new brand looks. The brand journey has also been very discerning and has taught everybody involved a lot. As the saying goes, he said, knowledge really is power.
“Embedding our new, refreshed brand internally has been an initial priority for us,” he said. “Throughout the whole of this project, we have been open, both internally and externally, to explain this is a brand journey – not an overnight refresh. It is important to us that we do not lose the good elements of our heritage; so, we will continue to embed our brand over the next 12-18 months keeping our clients and employees up to date along the way.”
