Services: Brand identity, visual identity (colors, logo, collateral), brand book oversight, program development (creation of an eight-week innovation challenge for employees).
Takeaway: Make the brand experiential and you’ll increase adoption much faster and in a more effective manner.
Story: As one of America’s leading financial corporations for over 140 years, Prudential has a reputation for being stable and responsible. When they decided to develop a new entity in the company for handling venture capital investments and their their innovations lab, they wanted to make it stand out from the traditional Prudential brand. The result was Gibraltar Ventures, their subsidiary for innovation work and funding.
Brand:Wallop was hired to develop their brand identity and brand execution elements including logo, collateral and even partnership with Pentagram on a brand book designed almost like a children’s picture book to convey the meaning of the brand. Following the brand launch, we also worked with Prudential to orchestrate their first ever Innovations Challenge. This eight-week long competition for more than 6,000 of their employees taught them the basics of design thinking, human-centered research and how to create a compelling business plan to present their ideas. The challenge was to come up with a solution to America’s savings crisis. The winner received over $1 million in funding for their new idea and the whole initiative was deemed a great success by both participants (many of whom said it was the highlight of their time at Prudential) and management (who saw the benefit of increasing innovation throughout the organization).
Best of all, Prudential employees became not only aware of Gibraltar Ventures and their innovations work, they participated in that. By experientially engaging the new brand, Prudential staff increased both their understanding of the role of innovation at Prudential and a greater sense of their own capacity for doing more innovative work.
In an ironic twist, the whole initiative was so successful that Prudential decided to bring the Gibraltar Ventures brand internally and make it a division of Prudential rather than as a sub-brand with its own identity.
