CASE STUDY
CUNA Mutual Group Becomes TruStage
Introducing a single powerful brand, from strategy to execution
Challenge
CUNA Mutual Group, a storied financial institution rooted in the credit union movement, has grown and diversified over its 80-year history. By 2021, it had become a $5 billion mutual insurance company providing services to credit unions, their members and other financial institutions. But while it delivered many products and services, it did so by using many different brands. CUNA Mutual Group wanted a unified strategy that matched its ambition, enabling it to continue its growth trajectory.
Solutions
To develop their vision for the future, CUNA Mutual Group partnered with Prophet, leveraging our interdisciplinary approach to craft a single-brand strategy, marrying the enterprise’s strong history with its growth ambitions.
This cross-functional team started with a clarified purpose for the enterprise, including the brand’s promise and principles. Using this distilled North Star, the organization now had somewhere to turn to ensure product-level value propositions align with core values and its plans for the future.
TruStage, CUNA Mutual Group’s successful insurance brand, emerged as the answer. TruStage illustrates how the company builds on trust, helping customers and the people they serve confidently navigate every stage of their financial journey.
Prophet worked closely with the company as it activated the new TruStage brand, finding ways to elevate and expand this brand for all stakeholders.
A core component of this approach involved equipping teams with the tools to pursue continued growth. That entailed bringing the new brand to life with comprehensive training to support employees. We created inspiring activations, designing immersive digital and physical employee experiences deployed during launch week, and giving them everything they need to carry the momentum forward. We also produced a comprehensive external brand campaign, including creative assets and tactical media plan, for the launch.
All told, Prophet delivered:
- Brand architecture and nomenclature strategy that supports a single brand strategy
- Visual and verbal identity and core messaging for key audiences
- A unified web experience that streamlined multiple unique web properties under one digital front door
- A purposeful and holistic enterprise content strategy
- Social channel architecture and taxonomy that clarifies and reinforces the single brand strategy
- A first ever corporate brand campaign, including comprehensive creative development and media plan
- An ongoing brand health tracking system
Results
The TruStage enterprise brand launched in May of 2023, generating exceptional internal and external engagement. Employees – many working remotely – returned to the office for various events during launch week, with an impressive 83% participation rate. The brand awareness campaign reached nearly 42 million targeted users, with ad engagement rates five times stronger than projected.
“Prophet was an instrumental partner in launching our TruStage brand, working closely with our teams as collaborative partners, to help define our brand strategy and architecture, and develop an integrated internal and external launch plan that brought our brand to life for our employees and our current and prospective customers. Prophet’s expertise enabled us to achieve strong impact at launch, providing over 5x more engagement than anticipated and more efficiently than we were expecting.”
Eric Hansing
Chief Marketing Officer