Anadolu Hayat Emekliik Brand Voice Design Project

About the project

All experience design practices have a primary goal in common: providing clarity and usability for the end-user. This goal entails designing a brand voice that establishes clear, consistent and concise communication for all users across all the touchpoints.

Established in 1990 as the first life insurance company of Turkey, Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik has generated Turkey's largest funds in the aggregate of life insurance and private pension system. Our paths have crossed when seeking excellence in customer experience, where we agreed to start by defining a brand personality to lay out a strong foundation for building a consistent and sustainable brand voice.

Problem

One of the fundamental issues we've encountered when reimagining the digital presence of Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik were the deviations introduced to the brand voice, growing with the number of added touchpoints. Besides the digital assets like e-mail communications, the web site and the online branch, there are several physical touchpoints such as the call centre, agencies, İşBank branches and various printed documents. This variety of medium and context gave prominence to challenges not only harmful in terms of user experience but also translated into difficulties in content creation and management. All stakeholders agreed that to achieve excellence in customer experience, standards for a consistent brand voice and tone had to be established.

4 related findings were obtained through user research:

These findings supported our initial assumption regarding the users, having difficulties comprehending the benefits of the various financial instruments Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik is offering.

How can Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik present its offerings in a more comprehensive manner to aid its mission to increase individual welfare and diminish personal financial concerns by contributing to the national economy? Which qualities should a brand voice demonstrate to support this mission? What goals should be considered when creating new content? We rolled up our sleeves to provide answers to these fundamental questions.

Our approach

"Language is the house of Being." Heidegger

Experience design is an interdisciplinary activity. While designing Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik’s brand voice, we advanced in the light of various theories that emphasize the interaction between language and thinking to develop a strategy that will lead us to the right solution.

The common denominator of these theories —which have influenced many disciplines in the field of social studies— is the emphasis on the power of language in shaping thought. This is the main starting point for most brands’ communication strategies because they are now aware of the strategic importance of the language they utilize in both internal and external communication.

From product design to marketing, human resources to law, each individual acting on behalf of the brand has a common responsibility of providing and protecting cohesive consistency in brand voice. Defining the brand voice and documenting a suitably designed tone are the prerequisites for thoroughly carrying out this responsibility. We have therefore decided to design a brand voice guideline as this project’s final deliverable to ensure sustainable governance.

Process

Brand voice is among the crucial factors residing in every little detail which in the aggregate shapes the personality of a brand and the experience that it offers to its stakeholders. Therefore, the personality of an organization has to be embraced by internal stakeholders to spread throughout the organization and beyond to the external stakeholders making up the peripheral value chain. We started by analyzing internal & external communication across all touchpoints online and offline to discover the existing brand voice of Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik. The discovery phase then proceeded with a competitor analysis in terms of brand voice & tone.

In the next step, we defined Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik’s brand personality and prepared the first draft of the guideline by documenting the brand voice standards for supporting and sustaining the personality. We proceeded to enrich the core guideline according to the findings acquired from qualitative and quantitative research and delivered it to the project owner. Lastly, we facilitated an interactive workshop with all the teams responsible for content production in Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik on how they could utilize the brand voice guideline. Today, the guideline is in good hands to be kept alive and up-to-date in the face of evolving user needs and business goals.

Our services

DISCOVERY & NEEDS ANALYSIS

Template Production and Resource Planning
Requirements Analysis
User Centered Design Canvas

BRAND PERSONALITY ANALYSIS

Stakeholder Interviews
Competitor Analysis
Brand Personality Workshop

CONTENT STRATEGY & INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Content Audit
Content Strategy
Information Architecture
Interaction Scenarios

BRAND VOICE DESIGN

Brand Personality Map
Brand Voice Guideline
Content Production & Audit Workshop under the Guidance of Brand Voice Guideline

Brand voice:
an authentic tone that will stand out in the competition

While designing the brand voice of Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik, whenever we needed answers to pave the way for the right solution, we turned to the users —the most important element within the user experience design. We conducted research and interviews with customers, employees and other stakeholders to explore the key elements building up on the existing brand voice.

We utilized a variety of methodologies during this process, from written and spoken content inventory analyses to one-on-one interviews and naturalistic observations to study how users behave in context. Thus, we determined the pain points rooted in Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik’s brand voice in the context of clarity, consistency, accessibility and usefulness, and created the ideal communication spectrum while keeping in mind both the user needs and business goals.

Brand personality:
shaping communication and relations

Our thoughts and feelings about a brand are shaped by how we perceive its personality. The voice may be the primary conduit of communication but it is merely a reflection of personality.

In the second step of the project, we facilitated a brand personality workshop designed in-house, based on the archetype theory by Carl G. Jung — founder of analytical psychology.

In this workshop, we defined the personality of Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik in the light of user needs and business goals — a strong foundation to build upon with an authentic brand voice. We proceeded by building a brand personality map, integrated to the user journey spanning along multiple touchpoints. This way, we identified the facets of its personality that are supposed to shine through, depending on the touchpoint medium and its place within the user journey.

Brand voice guideline: a low maintenance content production & management system

The archetypes included in Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik’s brand personality map provided a benchmark for the brand voice guideline we created in order to guide us through the content production and evaluation processes. When we first started building this document, we created a core principles guide in which we laid out content production goals, must-haves for each piece of content, and essential rules to follow when producing and managing content. Along the project, we expanded the guideline to cover for every single touchpoint and content type under dedicated sections to document how communication tone should be differentiated.

To conclude the project, we conducted an all-hands workshop with participation from every role responsible for content production and management at Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik. Taking the brand voice guideline as our reference, we have simulated content production and audit processes together by working on the content production canvas we designed in-house and answered participants’ questions. This way, we managed to establish organizational awareness on the strategic value enabled by basing brand communications on an authentic brand personality and the guideline became an essential instrument to sustain brand personality, reduce cognitive load and save costs significantly.