CorpComms Magazine

The birth of specialist insurer Beazley in 1986 came at a difficult time in the market's history. Lloyd's of London was beset by scandal and insurance underwriters faced losses totalling billions of pounds following a series of global disasters. Despite those tumultuous early years, however, Beazley has managed to return a profit every year.

The insurer attributes part of its success to a flat corporate structure, with different business divisions given equal weighting and allowed to remain distinct, a structure Beazley was keen to emphasise in its new branding.

The updated brand is centred around 'the Beazley line' - a continuous pencil mark that forms the new logo and also illustrates the insurer's different business lines. Beazley wanted to keep a group feel but at the same time allow the different teams to retain their own identity. 'That was very important to us,' explains Jane Roberts, head of communications at Beazley.

On the company's website, each business line has its own animation. For the marine division, the pencil sketches a cascading wave, while property insurance features a multi-storey apartment building illustrated from the top down, with each window picked out by the unbroken pencil line. 'Our marine team has a very strong sense of what it is, in the same way that our property team does. We didn't want to impose a homogenous brand across the whole business,' adds Roberts.

Beazley worked on the brief with London-based William Murray Hamm (WMH), the design team responsible for the packaging on Hovis bread. Garrick Hamm, creative director at WMH, says the pencil drawings help bring the work of Beazley to life in a way traditional corporate identities fail to do. 'We were deliberately illustrative,' he comments. 'We wanted to show what Beazley does without resorting to using a collection of photographs from an image bank.'

WMH also developed a short video to publicise Beazley's new corporate identity. All the words and images in the video are constructed by the Beazley line as it scrolls across the page. Produced both as a marketing tool and for training purposes, it can be viewed on Beazley's website.

For Hamm, the insurance market has changed in recent years and branding has become much more important. 'An industry consultant in the US has said that while insurance was traditionally bought, now it is sold,' he states. 'So people need to understand what Beazley is about. It is a specialist insurer, but that wasn't coming through; we had to bring that to life.'

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