Wiseman Khuzwayo
South Africa’s oldest short-term insurer, Mutual & Federal, has redesigned itself, complete with a new logo, with the aim of capturing new markets.
Gone is the outline of Table Mountain in the background of the logo, which the company has used for the past 30 of its 180 years.
In comes the distinctive green font, which aligns Mutual & Federal to its shareholder, Old Mutual.
Thirty years is a lot of brand equity to suddenly decide to ditch. So is it being fixed if nothing is broken?
Managing director Peter Todd said the brand refresh was a direct response to research that Mutual & Federal had conducted into the perceptions of the company’s name and brand identity.
“The research revealed that, while the Mutual & Federal brand was well established and entrenched, we lacked recognition and relevance for the younger market and emerging markets. This was something we were eager to change.”
Brand, customer and transformation executive Vuyo Lee said the research involved all the company’s stakeholders, including the boards of Mutual & Federal and Old Mutual, suppliers, employees and clients.
“Any rebranding is a serious undertaking because of its cost implications,” she said.
Both Lee and Todd refused to say how much this cost.
What is a fact is that big brands spend lots of money to change their logo. Vodacom spent more than R200 million to rebrand and change from blue to red, the colour of its UK parent company, Vodafone.
Mutual & Federal said the brand’s rejuvenation, which the company started in November last year, was an integral part of the corporation’s three-year strategic programme. The aim was to ensure Mutual & Federal became the market leader in short-term insurance.
One of the ways to achieve this goal was to focus on partnerships, said Todd. “For Mutual & Federal, the most important part of our business is relationships. Relationships with our brokers, our reinsurers and our stakeholders. This is why trust is a core value for Mutual & Federal, which we build on a day-to-day basis, be it in settling claims or developing market-leading products.”
Mutual & Federal has 12 percent of the short-term insurance market, while Santam leads with 23 percent.
The removal of Table Mountain from the logo was part of Mutual & Federal’s repositioning in southern Africa.
Todd said: “In order to ensure that the Mutual & Federal brand is seen as a unified offering across all of southern Africa, we believed that it was essential to have one visual identifier which could apply to all our regions.”
Mutual & Federal operates in Namibia and Botswana, and had different logos there.
Marketing adviser and analyst Chris Moerdyk said rebranding was dangerous. But redesigning the logo was not too problematic if it updated or modernised the brand.
“The name Mutual & Federal is well known to its customers and this is the first time it is redesigning the logo for years. So, I have no problem with that,” he said.