Overview

Parmenion is an award-winning technology and investment solutions business whose mission is to make investment simple and accessible for everyone.

Its technology enables UK financial advisers and advice brands to offer investment services to their clients.

Approach

Since its foundation in 2007, Parmenion has established a hard-won reputation as an innovative, responsive and dependable provider of fintech among the UK's advice community.

But after more than a decade of growth, and with ambitions to continue the trend for the next decade, Parmenion's leadership team wanted to make sure that its communications were clear about who the brand is for, how it helps, and what it stands for.

How did we decide to solve it?

Parmenion selected New Tradition to lead a review of its brand strategy and we identified four workstreams that needed to be addressed:

• Brand strategy
• Identity, branding, communication design and tone of voice
• Messaging
• Internal communication and adoption

For each stream, we selected creative agencies or individuals to support the project: Designers Bond and Coyne, Bethany Joy for brand voice, and Emma Canter for internal communication. Parmenion worked with the lang cat to pinpoint their target audience.

What did we do?

To discover what makes Parmenion’s brand tick, we embarked on an exhaustive exploration of its world. By weaving together insights from commissioned, existing studies and research we carried out ourselves, we learned all we could about Parmenion’s current and potential customers, its competitors, and the way it expresses itself online, in print and in person.

It became clear to us that Parmenion – whether it’s through its people or its technology – applies intelligent thinking to make investing straightforward.

And since that’s the core idea beating at the heart of Parmenion, our job was to make sure that its communications, and its customer’s experience of dealing with its people and technology, can consistently live up to the idea. We tackled that in two ways:

Internal communication: Helping Parmenion's people understand the brand’s strategy and core idea was a really important step in the process.

To help achieve it, we worked with cultural change specialist Emma Canter.

With Emma, we designed a comprehensive internal communications plan. At the heart of the programme was the creation of an internal website. This provided Parmenion’s people with a destination to learn more about the business’s strategy, and to explore assets and content including presentations, blogs and examples of copy.

Identity and communication design: Of course one of the most changes at the conclusion of any brand project is the shift in visual identity and branding. Working with Parmenion's in-house marketing team and Bond and Coyne, we facilitated the design of an activation plan resulting in:

• creation of revised brand identity and branding system
• delivery of brand assets and guidelines
• the rollout of revitalised online spaces - website and social
• creation of space branding and signage for Parmenion's premises

Results

By March 2021, Parmenion had ‘nearly doubled its market share’. During the same month, its owner, Abrdn – then Standard Life Aberdeen (or SLA) – announced the sale of Parmenion to Preservation Capital Partners in a transaction worth £102m. SLA bought the platform for £55.4m in 2016.