One voice across a global insurance group

The organisation

H.W. Kaufman Group is a global specialty insurance organisation made up of multiple companies, each with its own market, its own products and its own personality. Specialty insurance is a relationship business. Brokers deal with people they trust, and the marketing has to earn that trust rather than shout for attention.

The challenge with any group structure is consistency. Each company wants to feel like itself, but the group needs to feel like one organisation. Get that balance wrong in either direction and you either flatten good brands or confuse the market.

What we did

Our work sat across the group's B2B marketing: practical, broker focused and built to support the sales teams rather than sit alongside them.

• Brand consistency across group companies, so materials from different businesses clearly belonged to the same family
• Campaign and content marketing aimed at brokers, built around what they actually need to know rather than what the business wanted to say
• Sales enablement materials that gave underwriting and business development teams something genuinely useful to put in front of a prospect
• Email programmes with proper segmentation, so brokers heard about the products relevant to them and nothing else
• Event support, from materials and messaging through to the follow up that most companies forget

What it taught us

B2B marketing gets a reputation for being dull, and most of it earns that reputation. Working in specialty insurance taught us the fix is not being louder or quirkier. It is being more useful. A broker will read a plain email that saves them an hour. They will not read a clever one that wastes five minutes.

It also taught us how to work across a group of businesses without becoming a bottleneck. Templates, clear standards and trust in local teams beat central sign off on every asset. That lesson carries directly into how we run marketing for clients with more than one brand or location today.

Drawn from work with this organisation. Some details are generalised for confidentiality.