Fishburn Hedges puts friendly face on society

Insurance group United Friendly is to unveil a new identity on Monday, with design by Fishburn Hedges.

The launch of the identity will coincide with the group’s first national advertising campaign and is part of a group strategy involving both internal and external changes.

United Friendly has over 1.5 million customers and the new identity will be used for all the group’s brands.

“We’re using the new identity to unify all the parts of the organisation behind one brand,” says Graham Leigh, a director at United Friendly, which owns Federal General Insurance, United Friendly Finance and former American Express company Acuma Financial Planning.

“Internally, United Friendly is becoming far more client-focused, and part of the process of success is to raise the company’s external awareness. The new identity fuses that process,” says Leigh.

Fishburn Hedges creative director Michael Slater says the identity is deliberately a logotype because “the 86-year-old company had no obvious symbol which could be appropriately used”.

Slater adds: “The insurance market is full of derivative symbols, so the word-marque works well to differentiate the company. It also works well across a huge number of applications, which was one of the key things we had to incorporate into the solution.”