Great Eastern Life: Understand Insurance

Copywriting  /  Content Strategy  /  Brand Voice

If twelve-year olds bought insurance, they'd want to use this website.

Buying insurance is bewildering and scary. Most companies confuse and terrify their potential customers with arcane jargon and threats of calamity. But Great Eastern Life, one of Asia’s oldest insurance companies, wanted to try something new: Honesty. Transparency. Education.

With this in mind, we redesigned their website from the ground up, translating insurance-talk into language so simple a twelve-year-old could understand. We wanted to teach customers insurance basics, explaining why they might need it. 

We made customers’ lives easier, without making the lawyers’ lives (too) difficult. 

We spoke to customers, insurance agents and lots of internal stakeholders to develop a writing style that hadn't been done before. One that was straightforward, friendly and accessible, backed up by explanatory visuals and a rollover glossary for confusing terms.

The website's goal was simple: the more time you spent on it, the more you understood insurance. 

My role: chief translator of previously impenetrable jargon. 

As the project's copy lead, I worked with a team of writers and designers to explain insurance through simple language and visuals. In addition to educational copy, we also rewrote dozens of product pages in clear and straightforward language.

I also helped evolve the tone of voice as we shepherded it through countless meetings. I vetted copy for quality and consistency, helped set up review processes, and authored a product copywriting guide for the new brand voice.

There are words only insurance agents know. Strange, inhuman words like "enhanced death benefit" or "subrogation clause". 

Thanks to Great Eastern Life, regular people never need to hear these words again. 

• Collaborators: Imelda Teja Sukardi, Gary Steele, Sami Jääskeläinen

• Agency: TBWA\ Digital Arts Network Singapore