Challenge
Targeting areas of improvement It was clear when we began this process that Marsh had a story to tell, and they wanted to inspire users with it. Their decades of trusted service, willing collaboration and emphasis on a family atmosphere needed to shine—and so did the beautiful styles and finishes they bring to homes throughout the Eastern US. The problem with the existing Marsh site was that it relied too heavily on text to tell this story, and their online product browsing tool was clunky and difficult to use.
Solution
Finding our own inspiration We knew that we wanted the new aesthetic of the website to lean much more on photography. Our own video and photography crew traveled to High Point, North Carolina, to capture rich shots of the Marsh manufacturing facilities and workforce, which we used in large imagery blocks throughout the site. Our web developers created an unconventional but highly effective design that highlighted these images and seamlessly translated Marsh’s branding on-screen, helping to differentiate their digital identity from that of their competitors. To bring a premium feel to the user interface, our UX team even put together a unique menu design. Creating assets by the thousands The browsing tool called for even more ingenuity. Creating photographic assets of every Marsh product would have been an expensive and inefficient process, so our developers made a custom pipeline to generate over 5,000 images, all in CG. This allowed us to standardize woods, stains, glazes and paint colors, combining them consistently to showcase any product variation in a high-quality render that doesn’t look retouched. It really elevated the feel of the new tool, which Marsh chose to call the Style Selector. Joining the pieces together Art directors and copywriters implemented all of the necessary text and design attributes under the new brand guidelines we created for Marsh last year. The tone of the Marsh story aligned much more closely with their brand voice, and the accents, type and colors, combined with the new photography, packaged the content on the site and the Style Selector in a simple but striking way. The last part of the redesign was redefining the objectives for the website, then putting the steps in place to target the right users. Our Insights & Strategy team collaborated on this particular challenge, with great success.
Results
Over nine months, 15 members of The Power Agency contributed to the project, logging over 1,500 hours to make the site and Style Selector come alive. Marsh was thrilled with the work, and launched both digital properties on August 6, 2020. Each is a tribute to Marsh’s proud past and a testament to their exciting future, as well as proof of what our agency can do when we put our unique skillsets together.
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