Simplifying a financial services group built on decades of acquisitions is not straightforward.
For Standard Life, it meant taking a portfolio of separate brands and consolidating everything under one name, a project that has taken years of strategic groundwork to reach this point.
For Ben Rhodes, Group Brand and Marketing Director at Standard Life, that groundwork started on day one.
Why Simplify Now?
Phoenix Group had operated a portfolio of separate brands, with Rhodes joining in 2021 as group brand director, a strategic role.
“It made sense to have a portfolio of brands… we were only just at the beginning of our journey on creating a single employer brand,” he said.
By 2023, the business had moved away from relying on M&A and towards a growth-focused, consumer-led strategy.
“We’d started to move away from being this kind of back book consolidator into seeing a much more growth-focused, customer-led future,” Rhodes said.
This shift reflects a broader change across the pensions industry, where defined benefit schemes guaranteeing a fixed retirement income have given way to defined contribution schemes, placing far greater responsibility on individual savers to manage their own retirement outcomes.
Rhodes points to a statistic he finds “terrifying”: only one in seven DC savers have adequate savings for the retirement they want.
That context underlines the urgency behind the eventual decision to simplify the brand portfolio. But before simplifying, certain conditions needed to be met.
“We need to complete the journey we’ve been on to reinvigorate the Standard Life brand,” said Rhodes.
These conditions included leading positions in workplace pensions, individual annuities and pension risk transfer and a stronger track record of organic growth.
Once those thresholds were met, the decision to move to one brand became inevitable.
Finding the real drivers of consideration
Across 2024, Rhodes took over running the Standard Life brand directly, finding that most people had heard of Standard Life, but consideration was not as high as it should be:
“What I found very quickly was that actually most people have heard of Standard Life and they’ve got a degree of familiarity, but actually consideration was not as high as it should be.”
This prompted research into what actually drives consideration in the pensions category.
“Everyone says, well, it’s about being an expert, being trusted, and being reliable, and that’s what all the brands look like. Table stakes,” said Rhodes.
But those qualities turned out not to be the biggest drivers of consideration after all. “The most important one is to be relevant to the individual, and to be modern,” Rhodes said.
Along with being modern and relevant, being friendly and approachable were also key drivers in consideration.
Rhodes emphasised the importance of avoiding being “this kind of black box in the corner that no one can talk to, that speaks a slightly different language from everybody else.”
That research directly shaped Standard Life’s new positioning, landing on a phrase Rhodes describes as “the down to earth retirement champion for modern life.”
The phrase carries a deliberate dual meaning, with “down to earth” signalling accessibility – for everyone, not just wealthy customers.
“We are a business that has to be for everyone… not a high-net-worth company,” said Rhodes.
“Retirement champion” reflects a wider ambition than commercial success alone.
“Our vision is to be the leading retirement savings and investment business in the UK… we have to stand up for more. This can’t just be about our own personal interest,” added Rhodes.
Together, those two ideas – accessibility and ambition – gave Standard Life a positioning that could shape not just how the brand looked, but how it behaved across the business.
Building For the Life We Live
Standard Life’s new positioning needed to translate into more than just a new logo or colour scheme.
“We’re not going to change the logo, we’re not going to change the colours, we’re not going to change the typeface, but I am going to make this feel modern and relevant through motion, through colour, through sonics,” said Rhodes.
Standard Life built “For the Life We Live” – not just an advertising campaign, but a brand platform designed to demonstrate an understanding that people’s lives and retirements do not follow a predictable script.
The campaign reflects real, often unpredictable circumstances people face later in life, from family members moving back in during retirement to taking on caring responsibilities or having to work for longer than planned.
“We need to live in that world, that’s the world that our customers live in,” Rhodes said. He argues that if Standard Life wants to be seen as relevant, modern and friendly, it has to behave that way in how it communicates and shows up, not just claim it through words.
The brand platform marked the first, more visible phase of the transformation. What followed would prove far harder to deliver.
Getting the business aligned
The harder, longer-term work went beyond the advertising campaign – bringing the positioning into every part of the business.
Standard Life needed to refresh the corporate narrative, a document defining why the business exists and what problems it’s solving.
“We have a document that sets out why we are here, what we are seeking to do, and the problems we’re seeking to solve, and the way in which we are going to solve them,” said Rhodes.
The narrative was turned into playbooks and AI agents to help people write in a more consistent voice, which involved working with agency FTI alongside internal comms and corporate comms functions.
The company’s core values were adjusted to align with the “retirement champion” positioning.
“How do you inspire people to join your company? How do you inspire them to stay, and how do you inspire them to do brilliant work that is aligned to what you want to do? The only way to do that is through really, really strong narrative,” said Rhodes.
“It has got to be authentic, and that is the big task with 6,000 employees,” he added.
That alignment work is still ongoing, but it has already reshaped how Standard Life talks about itself, both inside and outside the business.
Managing the Board
Rhodes is candid about the challenge of getting board buy-in for a multi-year rebrand that isn’t cheap.
The approach centred on keeping brand strategy in lockstep with the overall enterprise strategy, framing brand as an enabler, not a standalone initiative, avoiding a “big bang” rebrand, instead phasing the change over three or four years to manage the cost.
“I pride myself that I create a degree of strategic inevitability about it,” said Rhodes.
Rather than creating new moments to announce change, Rhodes used existing points in the business calendar, such as half-year results, to introduce the rebrand.
The board, he found, was particularly responsive to the purpose behind it, helping people secure what Standard Life calls “a life of possibilities.”
That strategic patience, paired with a clear sense of purpose, gave the rebrand room to take shape without losing board confidence along the way.
Lessons Learned from outside financial services and whats coming
Rhodes draws on experience from Mastercard, Royal Mail and GSK, where he learned a consistent lesson: “people don’t buy functions and features, they buy feelings.”
At Mastercard, he points out, the payment experience is identical to its competitors, yet the brand feels entirely distinct.
The Aegon acquisition, still subject to regulatory approval, marks the next chapter and will bring in an additional 16 million policyholders into the group – giving Standard Life greater scale to push for change across the wider pensions system.
For Rhodes, the rebrand is just one part of a much larger ambition: getting more people to actually engage with their retirement.