Foresters Financial
Building a brand while maintaining crucial marketing continuity.
How Foresters Financial seamlessly delivered multiple mission-critical projects in a compelling five-week timeframe.
As an investment bond specialist managing over $400 million worth of funds, the team at Foresters Financial is fully immersed in delivering on their mission: to empower prosperity and protect legacies. They have a rich heritage of 170-years in safeguarding generational wealth. At the same time though, the team recognises the best way to build and maintain a proud legacy is through relentless focus on the future.
Driven by this insight, and an ongoing commitment to better serve and connect with their expansive membership base, Foresters Financial commissioned a strategic rebrand to better encapsulate their story, showcase their true value, and leapfrog competitors to lead the sector. A rebrand inevitably triggers change in both the short and long-term. Here’s how Foresters Financial seamlessly managed multiple streams of crucial marketing activity—a rapid website redevelopment, ongoing mission-critical initiatives, and a strategic rebrand—all concurrently, without any compromise on the steadfast excellence that defines their organisation.
The problem
Foresters Financial is deeply invested in building wealth for members. Despite this singular focus, the team recognises the critical role of marketing in supporting their objectives. With many initiatives simultaneously in play—from building digital services and systems to better serve existing customers, to pivoting their brand identity, to promoting their capability—Foresters Financial needs to manage a wide range of activities easily and efficiently. Despite this requirement, the team can’t afford to dilute focus from its main remit: empowering prosperity for members.
The approach
By partnering with two uniquely specialised teams from the same single organisation, Foresters Financial deftly managed multiple streams of concurrent marketing activity without losing focus or impetus on any single one. With the ability to make concurrent progress on a crucial website rebrand, business-as-usual marketing activity, and preparing assets and collateral for the new brand launch, Foresters delivered a new brand to market within an extremely short timeframe. All while seamlessly maintaining key activity in the background and continuing to build and deliver new digital services for existing customers.
The end-game
Deliver a new brand fully to market within five weeks of finalising the brand strategy. At the same time, continue with crucial marketing activity that can’t afford to stop simply because another pivotal project has come to the fore. And the ultimate end game? Empower Foresters Financial to focus on investment activity, connect with key audience segments, and continue to deliver growth through an ongoing partnership.
DELIVERING VALUE RAPIDLY
Having completed the strategic aspect of a rebrand project, Foresters Financial saw the need to move swiftly. The sooner you can launch a revitalised brand to market, the sooner it delivers value for the organisation.
While Foresters Financial is defined by exclusivity, trust, experience, and rich heritage, there was another vital quality the team sought to embody throughout the initial stages of the project: speed. Driven by compelling growth opportunities and the requirement to coincide with a launch event, the brand was brought to fruition over the course of a rapid fire five-week period.
This involved the full redesign and development of the new Foresters Financial website, and all wider marketing collateral associated with supporting the launch product disclosure statements, brochures, social media assets, and more.
Foresters Financial commits to excellence on every front, all at once. One critical project cannot compromise the success of others.
A FLEXIBLE APPROACH, A TRUSTED LEGACY
Foresters Financial is driven by safeguarding legacies: both their own and their customers. For an organisation defined by surety of generational wealth transfer, building a strong sense of trust in the brand language is essential.
Foresters Financial strongly believes in the ‘amelioration effect of visual design aesthetics on credibility’. Studies suggest a phenomenon that when the same content is presented to people using different levels of aesthetic treatment, the content with a higher treatment is judged as having higher credibility. A striking, luxe design is vital for a brand founded on a rich heritage of trust and credibility. Learn more about techniques to build and convey trust through visual design.
There are many ways a brand can visually come to fruition in a website product, even when working with the established nucleus of a recently revised brand strategy. By considering three distinct pathways for the website redesign—each with a different level of risk appetite and ambition—Foresters Financial had true control over how the project came to life.
PROGRESSING MULTIPLE PRIORITIES
While one team worked to build the website in five weeks, another team continued to maintain crucial progress in the background.
Foresters Financial is committed to providing the highest quality customer experience. As a testament to this, they invested in building out the functionality of a self-service portal within the website, where customers from the financial industry can update information, manage applications and more.
By working with two distinct teams operating in unique modes—one dedicated to the rapid development of the new website product, and the other building out new self-service functionalities and integrations to improve functionality of the self-service portal—Foresters Financial made enormous progress on multiple crucial projects. At the same time, dealing with a single provider ensured the experience was seamless to manage. The two teams could share context and rely on each other for information or decision-making, rather than continuously deferring to Foresters’ team members as a singular conduit between multiple providers.
REPLICATE THE FORESTERS APPROACH
Foresters Financial continues to hit compelling deadlines across a range of priorities. It's achieved this by working in collaboration with two uniquely specialised teams.
If you have a similar program of works—where multiple initiatives are all a critical priority—and you can’t afford to shift focus away from day-to-day operations, we have the proven experience, tools and systems to deliver seamlessly.
From our experience, if this is the case, then time is also of the essence. We’re ready to get started: what are you waiting for?