Ruben Kos

A new brand.

Affinity protects your income when your sick pay runs out. Poor health is one of the primary reasons for the loss of income amongst teachers in the United Kingdom.

The problem.

It's no surprise that teaching is consistently listed amongst the top three most stressful professions and that education has a higher than average level of work-related illness.

The last thing you need as a teacher, is the worry of a major drop in income when you become ill. Sadly, typically welfare and other benefits in the United Kingdom just aren't enough to make up the shortfall when sick pay runs out.

Goals and objectives.

Process.

Apart from the strategy that we had to come up with for launching a new brand, I also had to go through a creative process to define the actual look and feel to make sure the brand was communicating exactly what it should.

I worked closely together with people from Kesselskramer in London as they initially created the logo and color palette. Based on this work, I expanded the brand guidelines for digital as well as offline communication. Together we made sure we captured the emotions we wanted to capture and I ensured the brand received a unique and distinctive touch.

Before the design process of the different communication tools, I spoke to multiple target groups to ensure our assumptions were validated before we started designing. During the design process I continuously iterated the designs based on user testing sessions.

One of the biggest challenges during this project was figuring out how the ‘Benefit Checker’ should work. Before I started to lead the Design work, the client had already sketched out multiple ideas. Unfortunately, these were not very intuitive and during our user testing sessions we discovered they were hard to understand. After many iterations, concepts and hours of testing, I managed to create an easy to understand user experience that was tested very well among target groups. This tool was in return used by consultants to communicate the product in different schools across the United Kingdom.

Outcomes.

A big part of the strategical work was to create something that teachers would understand what it would mean to them if they would fall ill today. After becoming familiar with a lot of complex algorithms, I created a simple to use tool where the teacher only had to tell Affinity what their salary and age was. The so-called ‘Benefit Checker’ would then in return explain to the teacher in 4 easy steps what they would retrieve from the state, as well as what Affinity could do to help them.

• A unique and honest digital brand with an intuitive website.
• Ability to showcase teachers what impact becoming ill would have on their daily lives.

• An easy to use tool that made users understand the problem within seconds.
• Helping consultants showcase the value of the product Affinity is offering.

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