Chaucer Syndicates
Insurance, Design, UX, Development
Chaucer Syndicates, originally formed in 1922, are a leading global specialty insurance group who provide their clients with proven smart risk solutions.
Chaucer recently joined the Hanover Group, one of the largest insurance businesses in the United States. This partnership and their own growth in the market was the trigger for Chaucer to refine their brand communications and commission a modern responsive website.
Strategy & Planning
As with all our projects we kicked off our planning with a one day Strategic Content Profiling workshop: our opportunity to dig deep into Chaucer’s business, future aspirations and market. We wanted to understand how Chaucer should position themselves: what made them unique and ultimately different from their competitors.
As well as uncovering insights into the market Chaucer operates in, their audience groups and what their audience need, we ran through Information Architecture exercises designed to get a feel of the site structure, content requirements and homepage structure and content. We involved a wide stakeholder group so all departments were represented in the workshop, making sure we captured requirements and opinions from all areas of the business.
Brand development
Chaucer had their brand values well defined, with a solid brand positioning statement and promise. Liquid Light was tasked to refine this brand work into tangible customer facing marketing and positioning messages and imagery.
Through a series of iterative stakeholder sessions we rapidly worked through pairings of image and words that focused on each of Chaucer's brand pillars, resulting in a customer facing strapline that connects into Chaucer’s smart approach to risk.
Design & User Experience
Chaucer had an existing brand identity made up of a strong tri-colour palette, a colourway which is prominently used on their logotype and on their previous marketing material. Breathing new life into this brand while still retaining the colourway was one of the major design challenges of the project, with several design iterations focused on how this tri-colour palette was implemented within the site design.
Chaucer wanted a dynamic homepage, one which would allow them to communicate several key messages and also communicate a sense of dynamism, and a deliberate move away from a single image and strapline, a design paradigm used by many of their competitors.
Chaucer had quite narrow use cases for visitors to the site - we identified the need to find contact details for individual underwriters as a prime function of the site as well as giving brokers quick ways into product detail, with associated Underwriters and Claims staff prominently displayed on each product line. Visitors can drill down to individual product lines with ease from anywhere on the site, and our customized, focused search gives a direct method of getting to an Underwriter contact details, a function that can be accessed on every page.
The Result
We delivered Chaucer a dynamic responsive website with a clean minimal aesthetic and an optimised user experience.
Building on Chaucer's existing brand values we created the consumer facing ‘Smarter Choice’ strapline, an umbrella statement that all homepage messages sit under, and a positioning statement that gives a clear message around Chaucer's value and puts distance between themselves and their competitors.
"From the beginning of the process Liquid Light stood out from previous agencies we have worked with. They took the time to really listen and get under the skin of our business helping us to shape our brand messages through a series of workshops with key stakeholders across the business. They worked hard throughout the process to deliver new ideas at every stage of the process even challenging us where necessary. The result was a detailed information architecture process, combined with a clear development strategy, which helped us to ensure that the core functionality of our website facilitated an easy end-to-end user experience.
We are very pleased with the end result and how Liquid Light have helped us to create a dynamic and visually compelling website that helps truly reflect our brand.”
