This article was originally published in the Brand Finance Insurance 100 2025 report
Aviva's brand value has grown 19% to USD6.5 billion in 2025. This makes it the 25th most valuable insurance brand globally and top in the UK.
Phoebe Barter, Group Brand Director at Aviva shares insights into the brand's growth journey in a new spotlight.
Interview with Phoebe Barter
Group Brand Director,
Aviva
What are the defining moments or milestones in building and strengthening the Aviva brand?
Four key moments stand out:
The first was in 2020 when our then-new CEO introduced the ‘One Aviva’ strategy. This unified our business, focusing on where we had the greatest strength and growth potential. It gave us a galvanising belief: that our brand was stronger as a unified whole rather than a sum of individual parts. It reinforced our unique strength of being one of the few UK companies that serves customers across their lifespan, from their first savings to retirement.
The second milestone was translating our business strategy into a brand strategy. We built on our breadth and depth while recognising that finance is complex. Our brand strategy became about making the complex world of financial services ‘click’ for people, helping them engage. This extended to businesses, large and small, and the broader market infrastructure across the UK, Canada and Ireland.
The third pivotal moment was “unlocking” our brand. With a clear business and brand strategy, we launched our brand platform and campaign, ‘Making it Click,’ in December 2022. We focused on our brand expression – how we look, sound and feel. We evolved our expression from Aviva being perceived as cold, faceless, and old-fashioned to being experienced as warm, human, modern and empathetic. Our updated sponsorship strategy was designed to provide a tangible experience of our brand in action, built around the idea of Positive Spaces.
In 2023, we launched Aviva Studios, the largest investment in a national cultural project since the opening of Tate Modern. It attracted more than 700,000 visitors in its first year and was named by TIME Magazine as one of the Top 100 Places to Visit in the World in 2024.
Finally, we made sure to bring the entire organisation along with us. We built the brand from the inside out, recognising that our people are one of our strongest brand assets. The response was extraordinary - colleagues told us they finally could live the brand they had always believed in.
Employee engagement can significantly impact brand perception. How does Aviva involve employees in contributing to and aligning with the brand's values and goals?
Bringing colleagues with us has been pivotal in Aviva’s brand transformation. From the start, we recognised that our colleagues are not just employees—they are living embodiment of our brand.
We started by speaking to colleagues across the UK, Canada, and Ireland, across business units and at all tenure levels, to understand their lived experience of our brand.
What we heard was striking: internally, Aviva was seen as human-centric, caring, and empathetic. However, external research showed the brand was perceived as cold, faceless, and even masculine, lacking the warmth our people knew was at our heart. So, rather than reinvent, we amplified. We called this process ‘amplifying the brand magic’—unearthing the care, warmth and authenticity already within Aviva and finding ways to express it outwardly. Our colleagues provided a lot of feedback through testing.
We followed a similar approach when we were developing our brand campaign and platform.
Colleagues embraced our new brand strategy when we launched it - it practically rolled itself out. That’s because our brand transformation was focused on authentic Aviva behaviour.
The impact has been profound. ‘Making it Click’ was so well adopted that it’s become part of our company's vernacular—from leadership speeches to internal campaigns. Seeing colleagues take it, live it, and make it their own has been one of the most rewarding parts of this journey.
How does the Aviva brand aid in attracting and retaining top-tier talent?
As the leading brand in our industry, with a 325-year history and deep roots in the communities we serve, we naturally appeal to top talent. But they’re not the only reasons. In 2023, we worked on our brand’s colleague value proposition, ensuring our brand reflected our market leadership and the culture, passion, and purpose that make Aviva a great workplace. We applied the same ‘One Aviva’ mindset that drives our customer strategy to our people strategy. We had strong rewards and benefits, but they weren’t clearly articulated, and our culture wasn’t shining through externally.
We developed our colleague's value proposition: ‘Shine Bright’, inviting people to join, grow, and make a meaningful impact at Aviva. It’s built on three pillars: working better and brighter together, offering best-in-class benefits, and fostering a culture where people can be themselves and thrive. These aren’t just words, they are actions.
Who wouldn’t want to work for a top ‘fabric of the nation’ British brand, where they can do meaningful work, feel valued, and bring their whole selves to work? The brand is a powerful asset for our people, and our people are a powerful asset for our brand.
