ABOUT BRYAN BRAND STRATEGIST / CREATIVE DIRECTOR / FILM DIRECTOR
THE STORY OF THE YOUI BRAND TOLD THROUGH COMMERCIALS I DIRECTED FOR THE BRAND OVER THE 15 YEARS I WORKED AT YOUI.
A creative brand strategist.
I’m not a classic research based brand strategist. I’m a creative problem solver. I believe that’s what strategy is.
I think one needs to look at more than research when considering how a brand should be positioned. You need to consider all the factors that what would make your brand relevant to people and different to its competitors. The socio political situation, the economic landscape, the purpose of the company and the product itself and how differentiated it is. All these factors and more play a major role in positioning a brand. Once you’ve considered all of these things the real power of strategy is in the interpretation. The problem solving. The coming up with a solution that is unique and cuts through. That’s where the power of strategy sits.
I wrote the brand strategy for youi when it launched. I had to solve the problem that we were faced with when we landed in Australia: We asked a lot more questions to get to a premium than our competitors. We needed to ask those questions for the business model to work. So there was no getting rid of questions.
It needed a creative problem solve. A flip.
The insight for me was that people hate people making assumptions about them. This was what the other guys were doing. The trust of the big corporates was at an all time low with the Global Financial Crisis hitting so the idea that they were just making assumptions about people played into our hands perfectly. We were the new guys. The challenger brand taking on the big guys.
The best strategy repositions the competition and this was a classic. All we needed to do was tell people that by getting rid of questions their big corporate insurers were making assumptions about them. Job done. I came up with the positioning ‘the more you know about a person the less you have to assume about them.’ A perfect challenger message that repositioned the competitors as big, lazy and not about you, but about them.
We needed a name for the company that fitted the brand strategy. I came up with the name youi, a shortening of you.insured. It fitted the more personalised, getting to know you better strategy we were following.
Consistency is key to a strategy working. We were super consistent for the first ten years and we watched the brand grow amazingly. We were the fastest growing insurer from 2013-2016. The launch tag line ‘you.insured’ came out in research as the second most valuable Distinctive Brand Asset in the insurance category in 2023.
The launch brand strategy is what most people still remember about youi.