Brown and Brown rolls out rebrand as part of One Retail strategic plan

Global intermediary organisation Brown and Brown is in the process of rebranding its UK retail business, to help deliver its One Retail strategic plan and provide greater clarity on its operational network for end customers and insurers.

The rebrand is currently being rolled out across regional UK brokers that have been acquired by Brown and Brown – or by Global Risk Partners (GRP), which was bought by the US-headquartered firm in July 2022.

This work includes previously independent brokers’ signage and names being replaced with the Brown and Brown moniker, as well as a back office update to ensure that internal reporting and management information is aligned across the portfolio of companies.

The rebrand roll out commenced in December 2024 at Brown and Brown’s more “prominent” sites. Carolyn Callan, chief executive of UK retail at Brown and Brown, told Insurance Times that she expected the rebranding project to be finalised by 3 March this year.

Explaining the drivers behind the rebrand, Callan said: “We’ve got multiple brands at the moment – that’s confusing for a customer.

“[This] obviously leads to situations sometimes where one Brown and Brown office is speaking to a customer [at the same time as another office about the same risk]. So, [following the rebrand, it] will become a lot clearer to the customer that [they have] spoken to Brown and Brown.

“From an insurer perspective as well, quite often we’ll have a number of our offices that are trading with a particular regional office for an insurer and we can’t expect the underwriters in that office to know every time that those two businesses are both part of Brown and Brown.

“So, we should ultimately be able to negotiate better deals for our customers too.”

Another motivator that inspired the rebrand project was the ability for Brown and Brown to “display our full shop window” to customers through utilising “one website” for the UK.

Callan continued: “We’ll [be a] lot more joined up from a proposition perspective. There’s a lot of benefits coming out of the rebrand.”

Communicating that ‘nothing changes’

For Callan, a key facet of the rebrand project is centred in communications – to Brown and Brown’s staff, known internally as “teammates”, end customers and the broker’s insurer partners.

“The teammates bit is really key and them being able to articulate that nothing changes,” Callan emphasised.

“It’s the name above a door, it’s a sign outside. Ultimately, the service that those customers are used to getting [stays] exactly the same.

“People don’t change. The level of service doesn’t change. It’s a name change.

“So, [while the rebrand is] really important to our future, for me, it’s not important [in some ways] because it doesn’t change what we’re doing, what we’re about and our philosophy.”

However, Callan does admit that “taking teammates on the journey, making sure they understand the why and getting to that place where they’re proud to be part of the Brown and Brown group” does pose its challenges.

This is “because a lot of these businesses have still got the owners working for us, with businesses that they set up from scratch”.

She continued: “[All] of these business [have] been run by local entrepreneurs who had a vision, set something up, grew a successful business and then they’ve sold it to us.

“So, we need to ensure that we don’t stem the flow of creativity and entrepreneurship within the business and that’s something I’ve tried to really stress to all of our managing directors of each of the local businesses – that we don’t lose that along the way and become just a vanilla business.”

Meanwhile, communications to customers include signposting on Brown and Brown brokers’ current websites, as well as letters being sent out.

Callan added that there are a “handful of businesses” which Brown and Brown has “decided not to rebrand at this point in time” because they are “pure digital businesses”.

These organisations will be considered at a later stage of rebrand project to give Brown and Brown more time to work out how to facilitate a rebrand without “switching leads off for that business as a result”.

Callan confirmed: “That phased approach is really quite important.”

Standardising the back office

The ongoing rebrand forms part of Brown and Brown’s three-year One Retail strategy – a plan that Callan started brainstorming before she even formally joined the business back in October 2023.

Upon officially becoming a teammate and the broker’s retail managing director, “one of the things that became quite apparent after the first few weeks was that we were still operating as individual businesses”, Callan explained.

Brown and Brown has been highly acquisitive in recent years. Since 2022, when it added GRP to its stable, the American broker has made 14 acquisitions, according to November 2024 data from Tracxn.

Therefore, the One Retail strategy is focused on embedding acquired businesses and introducing a level of standardisation across Brown and Brown’s UK retail portfolio.

Callan said: “We’ve acquired lots of businesses, lots of different shapes and sizes, in lots of locations. Every time you bring one of those businesses into the group, you make it a little bit more complicated again.

“You’re bringing in a new policy admin system. You’re bringing in a different culture. You’re bringing in different incentive schemes, different ways of motivating people. You’re bringing in different risk and compliance regimes. And it starts to [become] a fragmented and complicated model.

“We’ve got to that point now where to continue to grow and scale the business, we’ve got to start to standardise things a little bit.

“Each [business] has tended to act in a bit of a silo, [so] how do we start to really collaborate and join all those businesses together to make sure that we put our best foot forward at every customer interaction?”

One Retail was launched to the broker group’s managing directors in April 2024. Callan was appointed into her current role as chief executive of UK retail in May 2024 – just ahead of organisation-wide roadshows taking place between May and July last year, to reveal and explain the One Retail plan to Brown and Brown teammates.

These in-person roadshows were led by Brown and Brown’s senior leadership team.

As part One Retail, Callan confirmed that Brown and Brown has “invested significantly in technology and infrastructure” since the back end of 2023.

To date, this has included rolling out software house Acturis, introducing more uniform and up to date telephony and email systems and implementing human resources platform Workday.

Callan explained that these steps aim to improve internal “efficiency” and “productivity” – however, she clarified that “when I use the ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’ words, I don’t mean losing people”.

She continued: “This model is about freeing up capacity to deliver much better service to our customers, but equally to grow without needing to continually bring more people in all the time. So, really embedding all of that change that we’ve done [in 2024].”

‘Pulling in the same direction’

Callan is passionate about the “massive benefits” that the One Retail plan can bring about for Brown and Brown.

She said: “For me, it will finally galvanise the team together because everybody will feel part of the same team and, hopefully, with the vision that I’ve shared with everybody in terms of where are we going, we end up with one team pulling in the same direction with a shared vision.

“I do see that as having massive benefits because we’ve grown really successfully in recent years, but we’ve done that as almost a bit of a fragmented business so far.”

For 2025, Callan intends “to keep on telling the story and our progress against that story, with our people and with the market.”