Over a 100-year history, Pitcairn grew from a single family office to a world-class advisory firm with deep expertise in managing multi-generational wealth. But the Pitcairn brand hadn’t evolved to match. Together, we dug into what makes Pitcairn unique, crafted new positioning and a new brand identity, and translated it all to a stunning new website.
Through stakeholder interviews, client surveys and thoughtful market research, we determined where Pitcairn really stood within the competitive landscape.
We used the new positioning to develop a modern and rich visual identity, focused on helping Pitcairn rise above industry tropes.
With a new brand identity in place, we created an engaging content strategy for a flexible new website. We also executed other key brand assets to relaunch Pitcairn into the world.
Understanding the audience demographic is just step one. We also had to identify which things about Pitcairn mattered most to the audience. We interviewed clients and key stakeholders to build a body of evidence.
Any great brand strategy starts with understanding the audience and what motivates them. Our research focused on the unique challenges Pitcairn’s ultra-high net worth clientele faces, and how attitudes around wealth and the expectations of a wealth manager have changed. What we found was that there were three primary things underpinning the decisions of these clients.
Through our discovery, we also identified an opportunity to more distinctly brand one of the tools at the heart of Pitcairn’s unique service model. Through a series of dedicated naming workshops, we landed on a name for the tool that’s the “secret sauce” behind the Pitcairn’s family services.
With a new brand comes the chance to document how it should be executed. With so many people working across the firm to execute the brand, we built out a practical guide to the Pitcairn voice, tone and key messages.
For wealthy families, the experience of working with Pitcairn is a breath of fresh air, an experience that feels collaborative and personalized. The new logo reflects our forward looking, upward trajectory and high-touch service while simultaneously grounding the firm in history.
The new logo revolves around two applications — the primary word mark, locked up with the new tagline, and the smaller badge application. Both evoke the history and stability of the firm, while adding a modern touch and preparing the brand for the next 100 years.
The new brand was designed to retain a connection to Pitcairn’s 100-year history while elevating the type, enriching the color palette, and pushing the photography into a more intimate people-focused direction. With the focus on family, the design needed to feel more personal, high-touch, and growth oriented.
We focused on simplifying the sitemap, making key information about services and product options easy to find for potential clients. We also identified an opportunity to elevate thought leadership on the site, and placed News & Insights in a prominent position in the architecture.
One of the key objectives for the new site was to ensure that it was more than just words on a screen. With strong new messaging and a beautiful new design language, we wanted the content to also feel deeply engaging, and to give users lots of ways to interact with the firm to grow the marketing funnel.
A key element of the Pitcairn brand is the Wealth Momentum service delivery model. It was previously represented by an infographic that felt technical and schematic, and was missing the personal touch our new brand demanded. We took the opportunity to reimagine the representation of Wealth Momentum on the site with simple motion effects that create clarity and increase engagement.
Pitcairn’s team is able to handle a client’s entire financial life — so the site’s content needed to represent that breadth, without overwhelming the user. We carefully planned connectivity between key service pages to demonstrate this comprehensive offering in a way that felt natural and easy to understand.
There was incredibly valuable content being produced by the Pitcairn team that wasn’t getting its due on the old site. We designed templates for both archives and articles that made the content more engaging, and also created opportunities on other areas of the site to feature related content that would keep users engaged and position Pitcairn as the industry’s leader on subjects that matter.
