How do you fit a giraffe into a life insurance brand? Working with YuLife on their new branding.

I recently had the pleasure of supporting YuLife with their brilliant rebrand project. Recently voted Tempo’s best London startup to work for in 2021, YuLife is a B2B life insurance firm that includes an innovative wellness app on top of their insurance offering. This wellness app allows them to “bring life back into life insurance” as their founder and CEO Sammy puts it.

CEO Sammy Rubin initially enlisted my help to assess whether it was time, four years in, for YuLife to hire a CMO and also help define the marketing foundation for their next stage of growth. So I thought (with his kind permission!) that I would walk you through my work with YuLife as a case study of what we do at Marketing Cube.

The audit

First we started with a short audit of their current operations and marketing needs.

The nature of the company means there are two major aspects to consider where marketing is concerned. The first is the health-tech app, which encourages users to walk, cycle and meditate with financial incentives and falls into the category of product marketing. We immediately saw how marketing could be utilised for growth in this area of the business: it could help identify what features to build next, be used to promote the app to the existing community, or even as a regeneration hook.

The second is the YuLife B2B sales team, where the B2B sales marketing function could assist the team in meeting their sales targets. On top of that, there was also an idea to expand into a direct-to-customer product and how to build that momentum and path.

The findings

With that in mind we decided to prioritise the site experience as an essential self-serve starting point for the direct-to-customer journey. This was a powerful enabler to shorten the sales cycles for the direct sales organisation with larger clients.

Though YuLife’s website at the time was polished and pleasing to the eye, from a visual perspective, there was something missing: the target audience. To me, the site didn’t talk to the key audience – the HR manager, shopping around for a corporate life insurance policy. It led with the app, which is a key differentiator. As exciting a concept as it is - and a powerhouse way to communicate and reinforce the business’s values - the app is not what prospective clients were looking to buy. They’re in the market for financial products, which weren’t being given enough space and credibility on the website. This in turn can be reinforced by a strong wellness proposition in the app.

The rebrand

To refocus YuLife’s unique brand we wanted to create the relevant site experience, optimised to the core buyer profiles, to deliver the growth ambitions of Yulife. With the additional expertise of the awesome Giles Brenard copy expert Nahim Afzal, and Matt Hauke design extraordinaire we:

• Leveraged insights from previous research done by YuLife
• Defined the strategic narrative that would resonate with the target audience
• Refined the brand positioning in the competitive landscape
• Created a distinctive and ownable brand identity showcasing a credible fintech player
• Created engaging and conversion optimised site structure and copy

The result

Now this dynamic rebrand, as well as looking vibrant and impactful, delivers a much more targeted offering for their audience. Essence that we summarised as:

• To turn financial products into a force for good.
• To change old-fashioned employee perks like life insurance into life-enhancing benefits.
• To transform products that are about death and illness into ones that inspire life and reward living.

We helped distill Yulife’s mission to: protect lives, reward living and inspire life - disrupting the death-centric image of traditional life insurance. Because we know that when people thrive, so does business.

I thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with YuLife and CEO Sammy Rubin, who shared that:

“Maya’s clarity of thought and speed of execution has been truly brilliant. Maya has added depth to our team and we have benefited so much from her input. She also has brought her extensive network to play through introducing added value services to our operation. She has truly left her mark!”

This is always lovely to hear!

----------------

To build or revamp a brand successfully, you need to know who the business is selling to, where the pain points are, what resonates with the target market, and what hurdles there are to overcome. These are the things that marketing needs to double down on. Once these elements have been worked out and refined, they can be communicated to copywriters and designers to create a new visual identity. 

It’s important to remember that visuals emerge out of a proposition, out of a narrative, out of the heart of a business - not the other way around. 

YuLife - who are so committed to heart that they’re represented by the land animal with the biggest one - are a fantastic example of doing this right.

–Maya Moufarek