AvivaWhen Norwich Union changed its name to Aviva in 2009, the insurance industry was notorious (and none too popular) for refusing to treat people as individuals. So, with ad agency AMV, they developed a new brand positioning built around recognition. Recognise me Aviva planned to behave differently by recognising everyone as individuals, both inside and outside the organisation. They wanted to spread the idea of recognition through their entire international organisation, and realised that an excellent way to do this was to change the way people write and speak to each other, and to customers. 300 years of tradition As Norwich Union, the company had been trading for over 300 years – there was a lot of archaic language still used by people who accepted it as part of the insurance tradition. Unfortunately, most customers didn’t understand it, so it had to change along with the other tradition of treating customers as one more statistic in a bank of figures. New tone of voice In 2007 after another personal recommendation, Aviva called us, and we started work on getting the “recognition” tone of voice exactly right. This was a huge (ad)venture for us. Once it was agreed by the board, we developed a set of guidelines for everyone to use, to change their writing style. Putting our own pens to work, we rewrote a stack of documents. Some of them sounded as if they’d been written in the 1870s and hadn’t changed a lot since. As the tone spread… Aviva’s language needed to feel more personal and also reassure customers that they were dealing with experts. With Afia’s updated documents setting the standard, the new tone of voice began to spread – it was infectious, but in a good way. We started one-day workshops and trained writers, the brand team, actuaries, human resources, lawyers, directors and business coaches. Some were already excellent by the time we met them. Others shed the shackles of Victorian style and began writing in a more human way. Tone of voice roll-out We trained around 1,000 people, in both written and spoken tone of voice, then worked with brand champions who took the message to another 20,000 people. And to take the guidelines out to 28 different countries, we produced a global toolkit for communications people worldwide. Now we’re running a series of one-hour online tone of voice top-up sessions. Lots of copywriting We’ve written communications for departments right across the business. We helped internal communication by loaning an Afia writer to work in-house, three days a week for eight months. We’ve worked on web pages and a tone of voice intranet site where Aviva people can learn about it for themselves. And we wrote the chairman and CEO’s letters for the annual report and then trained the internal team to bring the tone of voice to the rest. Phew. Just the start Aviva have grasped tone of voice as a long-term project and this is just the start. But it was a massive project for us and if we’ve done it right, Aviva won’t need us any more. Tone of voice |
