GMS’s Brand Refresh and What’s Next in 2025

The health and travel insurance industry is very competitive in Canada, and the experience customers have with their providers is becoming an increasingly important part of success. A key piece of that is the brand that underpins the products and customer experience. A brand overhaul is a major undertaking for any organization, but a particular challenge for insurance providers that are looking to differentiate themselves and effectively communicate with their target audiences amidst a competitive landscape.

Our long-time client, GMS, underwent a brand refresh to breathe new life into the brand that is the foundation for their products and customer experience. This is still an ongoing project and they have many other changes happening at the business level too, but the groundwork has been laid now to set a strong foundation for what lies ahead. I discussed this brand project with Matt Best, GMS’s marketing and communications manager, to understand the history behind the project and what’s next.

Vovia: Thanks for the time to talk about this today, Matt! Could you give me a little bit of background that led GMS and your team down the path of doing a brand refresh? It’s such a big undertaking for an organization.

Matt: Yes it is, and it’s something I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a couple of years. It started off as a desire to have more consistency in our branding and our name; Group Medical Services is our legal name and what we started as way back in 1949, and at the time it made sense – a conglomeration of people coming together to make sure people had access to medical services by providing insurance and benefits to people. So the ‘medical’ and ‘services’ parts made more sense. 

But over time that’s obviously been lost with the introduction of Medicare. We pivoted to offering health insurance that fills the gaps once Medicare was introduced. As the years passed, people became more accustomed to government health care, and were less familiar with the days before Medicare and how people protected themselves. The challenge became what do we call ourselves in this day and age? Group Medical Services was confusing to people because it didn’t say insurance plainly, so we needed to come up with a better way of articulating who we are both internally and externally in the market and what we offer. That was the initial driver behind the need to do this refresh. 
Beginning a business transformation was another driver. We started looking at how we were going to differentiate ourselves and stand out in the market – not just the look and feel of the brand, but the underlying pieces such as purpose, mission, vision, values.

Given all of these elements, it just seemed like the right time for a brand update.

V: I understand you wanted to start at the foundation of the brand to solidly form your brand positioning with support from Paper Plane Communications. What did you find to be the most challenging part of that process, either from an organizational or personal point of view?

M: As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been trying to get a brand refresh off the ground for a couple of years. During that time, we’ve worked with a few different brand partners and consultants. We had to hit pause a number of times as we reprioritized corporate projects or adjusted our direction. As a result, we accumulated a number of brand elements from different periods of work. What I found challenging was consolidating the previous work and identifying any missing pieces. Once that was done, we needed to bring everything together succinctly and cohesively, making sure we were articulating things in a way that represents who we are now and where we’re going. 

Our brand positioning specifically was challenging. It needed to capture who we are now, but also point to GMS’ future to differentiate us. It had to be a bit aspirational. This is a big part of our transformation, to differentiate ourselves in the market. We’ve looked at our branding as having pieces that won’t really change and some pieces that might evolve and get tweaked as we transform as a company and are able to do more.

V: So this has to be like a living and breathing thing, because if you’re waiting for everything to be perfect and ready to go, you may never get anything out.

M: Yes exactly, work with what you have right now and know that this will evolve. So some of the branding is aspirational in that way; we might not be there quite yet but we know where we want to go and we can communicate where we’re going. 

To help us with sales in this interim period as we’re going through this transformation, we decided to focus on this brand work now, with a new website being a big part of that. We’ll be adding components to the website as we transform. And our brand messages will evolve as we roll out new digital experiences through the site. One of those digital components that we’ll work to enhance is the resource hub. We want to build it out to help pull back the veil on health insurance and make customers feel comfortable with their purchase. It’s really about creating transparency and trust. So, while we’re fleshing things out, we’ve built a brand platform that we can then build on with these enhancements.

V: I think the platform is key, especially from a creative lens and your creative partner Zu did a really great job with that. What you’ve got now feels very unique to GMS, especially in your industry, with the imagery on the homepage of your site and even the colour choice of purple. It’s also a significant deviation from where you were previously. How did you feel that was received internally when you were presenting that?

M: People loved it. They really saw how it differentiated us as a company. One of the brand exercises we did was to place our old logo amongst other insurance companies. It didn’t really stand out. Our old logo featured blue and green prominently. There are a lot of blues and greens out there in the insurance space. Our new purple-based brand identity with softer lines in the logo was a great differentiator. There were happy accidents along the way too. Purple is associated with royalty and we’re in the Queen city, that’s our home base [Regina]. That was a fun little connection that wasn’t a conscious decision.

People here were ready for a change, especially with our transformation well underway, and really bought into it. The training and internal buzz we generated leading up to the brand launch helped too. I’m sure the box of new promo items we shared with our staff and partners didn’t hurt either.

V: Brand reworks are tricky because there is often that worry that the new direction is too different, but often you need to make a big change for it to be worth it. From a media perspective brand launches require a certain level of investment to ensure it breaks through and resonates with existing and new audiences. It will be really interesting from a measurement standpoint now that the site is launched and media is in market to assess further down the road how awareness has been positively impacted by this brand shift.

M: Yeah for sure, and zu did a great job there too. Their job is to push us and make us uncomfortable, push us out of our comfort zone, and Vovia does this too. It’s very easy to get stuck in that safe or comfort area. zu presented us with a spectrum of ideas, safe to a bit out there. We ended up somewhere in the middle but we wouldn’t have got there if they had just presented ‘safe’ options. 

The tagline ‘go, humans, go’ was a result of that process and was a great fit for us given our history and how GMS came to be. Some of that has been lost over the years. GMS ultimately began as a group of people coming together in Saskatchewan before Medicare was introduced. They wanted to make sure people were taken care of if the worst happened. Back then, if you had to go to the doctor you could end up having to sell your farm just to pay the medical bills. At the time creating your own cooperative was a bit of a grey area, so they were kind of rebels.  That human spirit of them coming together to create that safety net was the beginning of GMS, and the “go, humans, go” tagline really resonated with us for that reason. 

The challenge internally was making sure our team and leadership didn’t just see the brand as a marketing thing but rather a culture thing too. It has to be infused into our day-to-day to create the brand experiences we want.

V: I think that’s so important because increasingly we’re seeing people spending more time in niche spaces digitally and for a brand it’s hard to be in a million places at once. But if you’ve grounded yourself in this positioning as just people talking to people instead of the insurance company talking to its customers you can find ways to connect. Even in these digital spaces where people are seeking intimacy and personal connection there is the opportunity to connect on a human level. That’s pretty high level but that’s where the aspirational part of the branding comes in too.

M: That was the thinking with the tagline, to help find that human element and intimacy in our brand. Especially with AI becoming more and more prevalent. We’re known for our customer service and customer experiences, but people don’t necessarily expect that with insurance. It’s such an intangible product you want to find a connection with people. So we went the route of finding an opportunity to try and create an emotional connection with “go, humans, go”.

V: So you’ve done that foundational brand work, the website is launched – what’s next?

M: Building onto the website experience, optimizing the site and the user experience, phase two of our resource hub, and continuing our transformation as a company. Focusing on content development that helps people understand what they’re buying. We want people to purchase policies and feel confident that they know what they’ve got and how it works. We have product development in the works too.

Our transformation also means moving off our legacy system to a new one, which will allow for new opportunities.

V: That sounds exciting – lots ahead! Keeping looking forward, what’s a goal personally that you have for next year that you’re hoping to achieve?

M: I’m looking forward to getting the buyflow out. In addition to doing the brand and website we’ve been working on this new buying experience that will be built on top of the new platform we’re moving to. This would be a big win for me to get this out into the market and get people using it. This includes a new product we’re working on, and we’ve paid close attention to the pain points from our other products in the development of this new product.

V: Lastly, from an organizational level right now what do you see for GMS as your biggest challenge going into this next year?

M: I think it’s the competition, and that’s always been a challenge for us. Especially on the national level.This is something we’ve discussed a lot from a media perspective. Building awareness outside of Saskatchewan will be a challenge because there are so many other players out there, especially online. Understanding how we want to coordinate all we want to do is a challenge too, we’re very ambitious! We need to figure out how to take that right-sized bite of the pie.

V: Ambition is always needed to make change happen. Thanks for your time Matt, we look forward to checking it with you next year to see how things are going!