Embedding Brand Values in a Major Rebrand for Evelyn Partners

For two centuries, Tilney Smith & Williamson have been trusted advisors, helping families, entrepreneurs, and businesses to thrive through their commitment to delivering exceptional advice. In 2020, the firm underwent a major rebrand to unify its combined businesses under the new name, Evelyn Partners, with a singular mission: to place the power of good advice into more hands.

With the rebrand uniting several businesses under a single vision, Evelyn Partners faced the critical task of ensuring their brand values and purpose were consistently instilled in every client interaction. The challenge was to design and deliver new products and services that would remain true to the company’s heritage while paving the way for future growth. CreateFuture was engaged to help realise this vision and guide the company through this transformative period.

In the world of financial advice and wealth management, relationships are key. Evelyn Partners needed to adopt a user-centred approach to design brand experiences that encapsulated the spirit of partnership between clients and advisors. However, the company’s focus on functionality and the separation of projects across different teams led to a lack of cohesive thinking and a clear guiding vision. CreateFuture needed to work closely with Evelyn Partners to develop a toolkit that would enhance the team’s processes, improve the quality of their outputs, and ultimately benefit both the business and its clients.

Discover

Over a collaborative three-month programme, CreateFuture brought together Evelyn Partners’ teams around a shared vision through the creation of a practical Brand Experience Toolkit. This toolkit included customer personas, brand experience principles, customer journey maps with innovative concepts, and tone of voice guidelines. Through a combination of desk research, interviews, in-person workshops, remote design sprints, and experience development sessions, CreateFuture produced a series of inspiring artefacts, including posters and functional tools like the Experience Wheel, to help teams brief, develop, and evaluate design work.

Design

To ensure that Evelyn Partners could effectively communicate with their diverse audience, CreateFuture developed detailed personas based on extensive audience segmentation research. These personas were brought to life through illustrations, data points, and narrative formats, making them memorable and easily adopted by experience design, marketing, and front office teams. Additionally, CreateFuture crafted Experience Principles to align the brand’s aspirations with client needs, providing a structured yet flexible framework that facilitated innovation and expedited decision-making in the design process.

Deliver

CreateFuture focused on translating Evelyn Partners’ values into actionable guidelines:

• Values made verbal: Tone of Voice guidelines were established to ensure consistent communication across all client touchpoints.
• Innovation for the future: A design sprint was conducted to explore current customer journeys and develop forward-thinking brand experience ideas.
• Functional tools: A system was developed to help the design team create on-brand experiences and evaluate their work against the established principles.
• Inspiring artefacts: Both print and digital designs were created to visually represent the experience principles, helping to bring these concepts to life within the organisation.

The outputs from CreateFuture were compiled into a comprehensive deck that enabled the Proposition & Brand Experience team to effectively communicate the Brand Experience Toolkit to the wider CMO team. This toolkit has since become a cornerstone in Evelyn Partners’ approach to brand experience, marking the beginning of an exciting new chapter in their client interactions.