An insurer incorporated by Act of Parliament.

Manulife began with a long name and a prime minister. English Wikipedia says the company was incorporated as The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company by Act of Parliament on 23 June 1887, and that its first president was John A. Macdonald, then Prime Minister of Canada, who held the post from 1887 to 1891. Ontario’s lieutenant-governor, Alexander Campbell, was also involved. The idea for the company, the same article says, came from J. B. Carlile, who had come to Canada as an agent for the North American Life Assurance Company and based the new firm’s products on his own experience.

The early brand was tied to Macdonald’s politics. In 2015 the trade site Insurance Portal quoted Manulife’s own logo history, which said the company’s mark had evolved “from a symbol representing Sir John A. Macdonald’s political platform” to one representing professionalism, financial strength and growth.

The company soon sold abroad. English Wikipedia says it began selling policies outside Canada in Bermuda in 1893, followed by Caribbean islands in 1894 and 1895 and by China and Hong Kong in 1897. Members of Toronto’s Gooderham family led the company for long stretches: George Gooderham was president from 1891, William George Gooderham from 1914 and Melville Ross Gooderham from 1935. In 1901 the company amalgamated with the Temperance and General Life Assurance Company of Toronto.

Later mergers brought in other Canadian names. English Wikipedia says Manulife announced in 1984 that it had acquired the Dominion Life Assurance Company of Waterloo, Ontario, founded in 1889, and promised to keep a significant presence in that city. In 1996 the company amalgamated with North American Life, the insurer for which Carlile had once worked as an agent, and in the same year agreed with Sinochem to form a Shanghai-based joint venture life company.

The legal shape changed twice. English Wikipedia says shareholders voted in 1958 to turn the company into a mutual owned by its policyholders, and that in 1999 policyholders approved demutualisation. Shares of the new holding company began trading in Toronto, New York and Manila under the ticker MFC, and in Hong Kong under the code 945.

Manulife in Canada and Asia, John Hancock in the US.

The brand is split by geography. English Wikipedia says Manulife announced on 29 September 2003 its intent to acquire John Hancock Financial, the Boston insurer, in a stock-for-stock merger that also brought in the Canadian company Maritime Life. The group has operated in the United States primarily under the John Hancock name ever since, and as Manulife in Canada and Asia. Its headquarters remain in Toronto.

The word “Financial” went next. Insurance Portal reported on 27 October 2015 that the Manulife Financial brand name was being changed gradually to plain Manulife across the company’s businesses, and that the tagline “For your future” had been removed from its logo. The insurer had quietly begun the transition at the end of 2014. Jeronimo De Miguel, Manulife’s vice-president of branding and creative, told the site that the company had decided on the change in 2014 but preferred not to make it suddenly, with web pages, marketing documents and buildings due to change before the rest.

De Miguel gave three reasons. The shorter name reflected the habit of customers, who already called the company Manulife; it let the name appear in larger letters on documents; and dropping “Financial” was, he said, “an opportunity to reiterate that we are in the business of life”. The company’s note on the new mark, quoted by the site, said the simplified identity had more impact in marketing and continued the brand name introduced in the 1970s, and that a dual logo pairing the Manulife and John Hancock marks would be used where appropriate to show that the two brands belong to the same company.

Insurers, banks and their marks.

American financial brands tend to draw on a small set of visual ideas, and most of them are older than modern advertising. The first is the surname. Many firms in banking, insurance and investment carry the names of the people who started them, and a wordmark built from two family names reads as a signature, a promise that someone stands behind the account. Over time those names are often shortened to initials or a single word, and the letterforms are redrawn to look calm at small sizes on statements, cards and phone screens.

The second idea is the emblem. Eagles, shields, umbrellas and other protective shapes appear again and again because they are easy to read and suggest cover and steadiness without a word of copy. A plain box or square, filled with one strong colour, does similar work for firms that want to look restrained rather than heraldic.

The third idea belongs to advertising rather than the logo. Insurers in particular lean on recurring characters: animated mascots, invented animals and actors who return in campaign after campaign, so that a voice or a face becomes as recognisable as the mark itself. Together, names, emblems and familiar spokespeople give a set of abstract services something people can picture and remember.

A brighter green, drawn in Hong Kong.

The 2014 mark lasted four years. On 22 November 2018 Campaign Asia described Manulife’s new logo and look, released in all its global markets, as the work of Francesco Lagutaine, the company’s Hong Kong-based global chief marketing and experience design officer and a former Ogilvy & Mather executive. The update, the magazine said, brought a new green that Lagutaine described as containing “greater optimism” and more in line with the times, and a new proprietary Manulife typeface that worked better on screens than the old one.

Lagutaine said the previous logo, used from 2014 to 2018, still reflected an older way of dealing with customers that was “heavily paper-based”. The magazine noted that although the company is headquartered in Toronto, the design of its new look originated in Asia, from an in-house team in Hong Kong; Lagutaine said that, despite his agency background, he felt an in-house team was necessary for the rebrand.

The green was then put on the street. Campaign Asia reported that in Hong Kong several trams and MTR stations carried the new green and simpler messaging, that in Singapore the marketing team built ads around the social-media theme of “adulting” to start retirement conversations with young people, and that in the Philippines the brand appeared on the backseat screens of Grab cars. Lagutaine said that, for now, the company’s point of view was “visual”.

For a design guide, Manulife shows how a long corporate name can be cut back to the word customers already use, and how a colour and a typeface can be redrawn for screens without changing the name again. Compare MetLife, another life insurer built on a shortened name, and AIA, a rival across many of the same Asian markets. For this guide we use bright green, forest green and pale mint with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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