A timeless brand for a finance firm with 130 years of history reflects their future focus and expertise.

Operating for over a century, Baillieu Holst faced a major obstacle to their future business growth – a negative perception of the business as dated and out of touch. In order to create a modern, progressive and truly national wealth management, institutional and corporate advisory brand, the history of the business needed to be turned into its greatest strength.

Mastery of Change

We collaborated with Manifesto to undertake internal and external stakeholder research and create a brand strategy that would effectively reposition the organisation.

As part of the rebranding exercise, the company decided to shorten the business name from ‘Baillieu Holst’ to ‘Baillieu’.

The Self-truth® ‘Mastery of Change’ describes Baillieu’s proven ability to stay at the forefront of change in financial and investment markets.

Through considered visual and verbal communication the brand expresses both the future focus of the business and the benefit more than 100 years of experience brings to new and existing clients.

The new identity incorporates a dynamic timeline, visually representing change over time and Baillieu’s willingness to embrace this change.

The line creates a visual tool for Baillieu which forms the basis for illustration and animation. We collaborated with Never Sit Still on an animated brand film to bring the idea to life.

The tagline 1889 Onward further reinforces this future focus.

System wide change

A comprehensive visual system was created to standardise the hundreds of product brochures, investment recommendations, newsletters, monthly reviews and daily reports authored by Baillieu’s in house team.

Apostrophe collaborated on copywriting and created a Tone of Voice Guide to verbally articulate the new brand identity.

A digital ecosystem

A large part of signalling change for Baillieu was creating a new digital ecosystem. At the centre of this is a bespoke website which clearly explains the company’s approach, offer and history. Highly animated and constantly updated, it represents the progressive organisation Baillieu has become.

To capitalise on Baillieu’s in house research team, a selection of articles are now available for anyone to read on the site and through podcasts and downloadable reports, with more timely and premium content only available to clients through log-in. A new logged-in client experience is currently in development.

Mastering Change film series

To further reinforce the new brand positioning we created the Mastering Change film series. In the series, we go beyond finance to explore the ways that exceptional Australians have mastered change within their lives and professions.

A collaboration with Burning House, future episodes are currently in production.

Results

Post rebrand, Ord Minnett, a wealth management group, specialising in stockbroking, private wealth management, corporate finance, institutional equities and in philanthropic services acquired 100% of the business.

The sale of the company, consisting of nine locations around Australia including Melbourne as its head office further strengthened Ord Minnett as one of Australia’s largest independent private wealth firms.

Self-titled combined strategy and design expertise to develop a brand idea that reinforces Baillieu’s long history and heritage and expresses it as a competitive point of difference.

Simon Power, Director, Baillieu Limited

Credits