Nobody could say what made Embroker different

Positioning an insurtech in a category where the products are basically the same.

The problem: A saturated insurance market, two audiences, and a company that couldn't agree on who it was or what set it apart.

My role: Ran the positioning from research through workshop to mission, identity, and the brand guidelines that came out of it.

The move: Build the difference out of meaning, since the products in the category are all the same, and get the whole company to actually agree on it.

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Nobody at Embroker could tell me what made the company different. Not the execs, not the marketers, not even the sales team who talked to customers all day. I'd ask what set them apart from a competitor, and I'd get a pause, and then something that could have been printed on any insurance website.

That's not a knock on them. It's insurance. The category is saturated, the products are close to identical, and there are only so many ways to talk about a thing nobody wants to buy but everyone has to. The question I was actually hired to answer was blunt. Why Embroker over someone like Hiscox, who has been around roughly forever.

A company that couldn't agree on itself

The differentiation problem sat on top of a messier one. Nobody inside agreed on where the company was going or who it even was.

Embroker sold insurance directly, and it also sold through other brokers under a second name, Embroker Access, which was a mouthful and quietly did a huge amount of business. Two audiences, and no agreement on which one the company was really for.

Then there was the tech fight. Leadership was moving toward AI and a self-serve model, people buying their own insurance without ever talking to a human. The trouble is that a lot of Embroker's customers chose it because they got to talk to a human, and insurance is complicated enough that most buyers don't actually know what they need.

Self-serve also meant cutting the sales team, so the people whose jobs were on the line pushed back, and they had a point.

The move

I ran research on what buyers actually wanted, and it split clean. For a high-stakes policy, people wanted a person, and the sales team was right about that. For a solopreneur who needs one specific kind of coverage, self-serve was genuinely better.

Both were true, so whatever I built had to hold both without picking a favorite.

Then I got everyone in a room. Not just the leads, I pulled in customer success and sales people too, since they were the ones actually talking to customers every week. And I ran it like we were building a movie. Everyone filled out who the characters were, the setting, the plot, the conflict, the archetypes, the mission.

The thing that jumped out was the same thing I'd walked in with. Asked what made Embroker unique, what made the competition unique, what made either side better or worse, almost nobody could answer the "different" part. They just couldn't say it.

So that became the job. The difference wasn't going to come from the product, because there wasn't one hiding in there. It had to be built.

In a category where the products are basically the same, the brand story is the only thing left to make different.

Protectors of upside

The crack in the wall came from a customer success leader. He said what he thought he was really doing, day to day, was giving people the freedom to get on with their lives without lying awake over what happens if it all falls apart. He was selling upside.

Every competitor in the category sells the same thing, which is fear. Here's everything that could go wrong, here's the policy that covers it. Embroker went the other way and became the protector of upside.

A hopeful insurance brand, which in that category is almost a contradiction.

The goal turned into equipping small businesses to take the right risks with confidence, and as easily as possible. The personality we landed on was a guy in a sharp suit and bright red sneakers. Serious about the work, not grim about it.

The call that settled the fight

The upside idea was the heart of it, and it didn't resolve the self-serve war on its own. That took one sentence.

Embroker was a brokerage that used technology as a tool to get customers where they wanted to go. The tech served the brokers, and it opened a self-serve door for the solopreneurs who wanted one, and it wasn't there to delete anyone's job. That framing honored the sales team's truth and leadership's ambition at once, and it settled a fight that had been running for months.

We also killed the Shotwell dog, the old icon. Everyone loved him, and his story had drifted away from what the company had actually become, so he had to go. We built a simple stamp off the wordmark instead. The palette went bolder and higher contrast, off the pastel easter-egg colors, and the font changed to something more readable, since a big chunk of the audience skewed older. Business, with red sneakers.

Did it work

For positioning, the real test is whether a company can finally say who it is and mean it. Before this, Embroker couldn't. An agency had handed them a look with no reasoning under it, and a product lead had just run with it. After the work, everyone from the CEO down to the sales floor could describe the same company. They aligned on a mission, an identity, and a set of guidelines we rebuilt from the positioning up.

Then the rollout stopped, hard. They laid off the whole team right after we finished. The boilerplates, the guidelines, the events we were building with webinar partners, none of it made it into the market, and there's no performance data to point at.

What shipped was the agreement, which for positioning is the part that's actually hard. The campaigns are easy once everyone knows who they are.