What does it take to make a 200-year-old financial giant feel relevant to a generation that isn’t thinking about retirement? That's the question Conran Design Group found itself tackling when it took on the job of leading a full-scale brand transformation for pensions and retirement company Standard Life.
Recently elevated to the position of master brand for parent company Phoenix Group plc, Standard Life found itself facing a broader role and wider audience. And it was clear that in order to engage with a younger generation, the brand needed revitalising to compete with its peers as a modern and relevant retirement business. Like all the best rebrands of the 2020s, this one has made a heritage brand feel much more contemporary.
Conran Design Group developed a new brand positioning for Standard Life, encompassing a new vibrant, digital-first colour palette, a new photography style, a bolder approach to type and new pictograms, illustrations and icons. It also created a new distinctive brand asset: the Journey Line, a hero device that symbolised the ups and downs of everyone’s journey to and through retirement.
We caught up with Charlie Skinner, head of brand strategy at Conran Design Group, to find out more about the process of bringing Standard Life to life for 2026.
How do you make a 200 year-old financial brand feel relevant to younger generations?
The reality is that 6 out of 7 people in the UK are financially unprepared for retirement, so appealing to younger audiences is as much of a public necessity as it is a business growth move.
When you’ve got a brand with as much heritage as Standard Life, it’s a careful balance: retaining that equity is as important as pushing your brand forwards. Pension brands are all about trust – they’re responsible for people’s life savings, after all – so they can’t afford to seem unstable or fickle, or in extreme cases, become unrecognisable to their customers.
With Standard Life’s new positioning as ‘the down-to-earth retirement champion’, we wanted to lean into that accessible, approachable sentiment. There was a resounding feeling at Standard Life that their brand didn’t have a point of view and wasn’t exciting – which is no way to engage an audience that could quite happily avoid the topic of pensions. Connecting with people that aren’t considering their retirement a top priority anytime soon meant coming across more modern, friendly and relevant.
Crucially, Standard Life relaunched with a purpose: helping people secure a life of possibilities. This extends the brand beyond the usual hygiene factors of its sector – reliability, security – and brings a sense of action and empowerment that appeals to a younger audience.
The move Standard Life has made is a category move: as retirement champions, they’re representing the category and committing to promoting it in the national consciousness.
What are the challenges of designing a brand for a subject (retirement) that most people avoid?
With financial service brands, you’re encountering two obstacles when engaging your audience. There’s ignorance – because this technical and jargon-filled industry is enshrouded in intimidation – and there’s avoidance. Financial interactions are stress interactions, in that people engage not because they want to, but because they have to. So most of us have our heads in the sand.
If you get the tone wrong when designing your brand, the risk is that people will bury their heads deeper into the sand. The role of brand is to bridge the inaccessible world of financial services with our ‘real’ world. Instead of intimidating or lecturing, it’s about empowering your audience. This promotes a shift from apathy to agency. An industry experiencing this very same shift is healthcare. Consumers are now encouraged to take action: their wellbeing is in their own hands.
How did you use elements such as colour, tone of voice and imagery to create a more contemporary identity?
Standard Life has a recognisable colour palette of heritage blue and yellow. It was important to keep these well-loved brand identifiers, but we layered in a secondary, digital-first colour palette. The yellow and blue now have a brighter set and a lighter set to bring more vibrancy and electricity to the brand’s look and feel.
Pension providers can fall into clichés with photography – think grandparents on the beach – so we steered away from these familiar tropes and captured energetic life moments that appeal to a millennial age group.
We also created a new distinctive brand asset, the Journey Line, which appears throughout creative as a dynamic symbol of the road to retirement. It signifies that your retirement journey has already begun – whether we like it or not.
How have you approached the challenge of speaking to a broader range of audiences?
Our first step was creating three new personality traits for the brand, which flipped the script of the financial services category. ‘Bold’ challenges the passive, safe rhetoric of pension providers. ‘Optimistic’ pushes positivity, instead of motivating with guilt or fear, which is a very easy button to press. ‘Empathetic’ brings the human connection – this is not a cold financial corporation, these are real people who understand the challenges we all face on our road to retirement and are here to help.
These active personality traits informed a more conversational tone of voice. While the language of financial services is typically focussed on safety, prevention, disaster, it was important for us to bring in the optimism. Younger audiences need to be warmly welcomed – not scared away – because they don’t have that same sense of obligation to think about their pensions as older audiences.
The voice of Standard Life has gone from passive, “We’re here if you need us”, to active, “Get the future you’ve earned.”
Finally – we’ve adapted our tone of voice to the specific needs of each audience – from the much more technical B2B audiences, to investors, to financial intermediaries, to end consumers. But without losing the essential character of the brand.
