HiRoad brand strategy & guidelines
Challenge: “win tech-savvy Millennial customers away from billions-spending incumbents, and reframe the category as aspirational instead of transactional.”
Context: as the first writer hired when HiRoad had under 40 employees, I worked daily with our CMO, creative director, customer insights team, and web developer on all aspects of brand strategy and execution.
Process: conducting a competitive audit, I saw that the incumbents were mostly red and blue, and focused on functional considerations like price and coverage in their messaging. Our opportunity was to use green, and make values-driven customers feel seen and empowered, rather than simply categorized by their age or ZIP code.
What / How / Why customer journey thinking for trial experience screens.
Marketing ideas based on customer psychographics and brand differentiation.
Taglines exploring our USP of being behavior-based rather than demographic-based.
Process: mapping out how our ideal customers would shift their thinking about insurance.
Solution: a brand manifesto inspiring customers and employees to join a tribe of people making the world a better place.
Solution: a brand promise to reinforce our unique position in the industry and inform everything from data use to UX design.
Solution: enabling everyone in the company to talk about the HiRoad brand easily. We printed these wallet cards and gave them to all employees.
(Full guidelines below; collaborating extensively with our creative director, I wrote the “why” explaining how the brand came to life everywhere from the candid, unposed photography style to artful illustrations and tastefully distinct icons.
Success
Fastest-growing car insurance company in the nation
9/10 customer referals
“Nate has the rare combination of being a visionary, thought leader, human-centered thinker, awesome collaborator, and a great human being.” — Merlyn Fraga, Lead Researcher, Sales Cloud, Salesforce (former HiRoad teammate)