Elevated Brand Identity

This year Sapiens is celebrating 40 years , and accelerating our mission of enabling insurance transformation. As Sapiens continues to reach new highs, it constantly changes, evolves, adapts. We are continuously looking to stretch our boundaries and challenge ourselves to make our messages to the market clearer and more effective.

Over the past six months, Sapiens’ marketing and design team did a lot of brainstorming, with creative and strategic thinking to create strong and cohesive visual branding.

It starts with brand identity. Sapiens powers insurers to successfully change and adapt, to thrive through the transformations of our time, covering end-to-end needs, solving business challenges, and providing technology & innovation. Along with the messaging refinement done on our WHY process, we saw branding as an opportunity to sharpen our visual deliverables and upgrade our look and feel. Our vision was to establish a unified brand and company messaging across all Sapiens assets; clear brand identity is essential via all communication channels. It enables our customers, investors, and potential employees to recognize our brand anywhere and gives our current employees (Sapiens’ ambassadors) a strong sense of pride to be an integral part of a strong, recognizable company.

In this case, we needed to operate on two parallel paths:

1. Externally – Convey the message and new branding to our target audiences in the most accurate way possible.
2. Internally – Onboard Sapiens employees and our company active users and creators with brand trainings, going through our new brand book and guidelines.
Our challenges
House of brands: Over the years, Sapiens has acquired and partnered with many companies and products which resulted in a blurred ‘’house of brands’’ image.
Across the universe: Whether through organic growth or acquisitions, Sapiens developed a breadth of portfolio and solutions in a range of fields. All our business units and acquired companies are represented as a ‘’Universe’’ – each of them has an intrinsic value which contributes to the overall system, but visually this caused an unfocused appearance.
Color palette: Each business unit used to be assigned a color from the Sapiens color palette, so that all their collaterals would be designed around that main color. All this resulted in a confusing palette.
Insurtech or Lifestyle? Every company has an image language that supports its messaging. We had been focusing on photos of people – to reflect the human factor – in various fun settings, which was not fully supporting our identity as an insurance software solutions provider.

The Solution

Branded house: We wanted to embrace a ‘’branded house’’ practice. Through our research, we concluded that we need to relate to Sapiens as a single unified company, that despite its broad array of solutions empowering the industry, it shares one single brand. This means that no matter what product or business unit you are dealing with, you will always know that it is a part of the automatically recognizable Sapiens brand.

Digital first: Following COVID and its repercussions, we accelerated our adaptation to a more digital-minded world. One of our central rebranding decisions was not to erase our identity and start over, but rather to honor our tradition and built on our heritage. We also chose to take it a step up with our colors. They became bolder, more saturated and with more contrast, to make them “pop” more online and in social media. The color ratio and usage in company assets was also changed.

Photographic language: As a B2B company; we must keep the end user in mind but focus primarily on our offering and products, emphasizing our technology alongside our messaging. We decided on three main pillars for imagery:

1. Value images – Conceptual images, based on the updated messaging,
2. Business technology – based mostly on images with technological essence and products, and
3. People & Tech – which combines technology with the human factor. After all, we provide a service to people who use technology. We also apply a Photoshop filter that slightly changes the coloring of the images and helps create a more cohesive look.

Icons are forever: We a have lot of information and knowledge to share with our customers and partners, and a lot of examples of how our products and services work. For that reason, we created a series of icons that support our content in a graphical, geometric, and colorful way, sometimes even standing alone. Our universe element was also adapted into a more open, playful, and iconic look and feel.

Summary

Whereas a new brand is a clean slate upon which you can write your own story from scratch, a rebrand is a more complex process in which your exciting story comes with a plot twist to keep the reader interested. Rebranding is a 3D process – Definition, Dose, Decision:

1. Definition – find the issues with your current brand with extensive research that will help you find the relevant solutions.
2. Dose – A new brand doesn’t always have to have a major plot twist. Sometimes a few tweaks make all the difference in finetuning or elevating the existing story. The challenge is to find the right dosage/balance and not just copy what others are doing. Finding that perfect dose helps define your unique brand identity.
3. Decision – once you’ve decided on the changes, implement them and stick to them. Stand behind your changes and empower your employees to take an active part in maintaining the updated company brand.

Rebranding is not something you do very often; a well-implemented plan will go a long way towards creating ideal brand awareness. The Sapiens brand launch was phase one. We are now heading towards phase two, which involves aligning more company assets, along with reaching out proactively to more and more projects within the Sapiens universe that need to be refined and rebranded. Stay tuned!

We would like to thank our marketing team and especially Shay Assaraf and Tally Kaplan Porat for supporting this branding process.