Taking a new retirement offering to market, and a new brand with it
The client
Edelman Financial Engines is a national financial planning and wealth management firm. Its Retirement Plans Division advises employer-sponsored plans such as 401(k), profit-sharing and cash balance plans.
The challenge
Edelman was taking its retirement plan expertise to a new audience: small and medium-size businesses, typically plans with fewer than 300 employees. The pitch to owners was simple to say and hard to show: offering a retirement plan shouldn't feel like a second job, and Edelman can share the liability, the burden and the hassle. To go to market, the team needed a complete sales toolkit for employer conversations, sales meetings and trade shows.
There was a second challenge underneath the first. Edelman had recently rebranded, but the new identity didn't yet have comprehensive standards for how it should be applied. These launch materials would be among the first places the new brand had to work at full scale.
Our approach
We treated the toolkit as the place where the new brand would be defined in practice. Starting from the new identity's core colors, shapes and fonts, we created the first full expression of the look in marketing materials beyond Edelman's recently updated website, building a working system: bold, condensed uppercase headlines anchored by a red accent rule; a consistent set of red line icons; warm, people-first photography in rounded frames; and modular callouts that turn big numbers and complex services into something an owner can scan in seconds. Simple diagrams showed where Edelman sits between the business owner, employees, recordkeeper and plan administrator.
The same system stretched from a seven-spread capabilities brochure to a compact leave-behind, sales presentations and trade-show graphics, so the launch looked like one confident offering from day one. Along the way, we helped shape and edit Edelman's copy for clarity and flow.
The work
Long-form capabilities brochure
"Mini" capabilities brochure for quick leave-behinds
PowerPoint presentations for sales meetings
Trade-show graphics
The result
The new materials gave Edelman's team working examples of the new brand in use and allowed them to compete in a new market space.
Services: Brand extension · Copy editing · Brochure design · Presentation design · Trade-show graphics