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.

How we approached it

B2B buyers are just busy people at work. Everything we made was built around being useful to a broker, not impressive to a marketer.

1. Standards, not sign-off. Templates and clear brand standards let each company move quickly while still looking like family, without every asset queuing for central approval.
2. Useful beats clever. Campaigns and content were built around what brokers actually need to know: appetite, capacity, turnaround, contacts.
3. Arm the sales team. Underwriters and business development got materials worth putting in front of a prospect, not brochures that flatter the company.
4. Segment ruthlessly. Email programmes meant brokers heard about products relevant to them and nothing else, which is why they kept opening them.

What we delivered

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.

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.

What this means for your business

If you sell to other businesses, your buyers are drowning in content that wastes their time. The fastest way to stand out is to be reliably useful: clear products, clear answers, materials your sales people are proud to send. And if you run more than one brand, location or product line, we know how to keep them coherent without slowing everyone down.

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