Legal & General: Forgetting the outside world

What seemed like a snappy idea in-house plays differently to an external audience.

The Site

Legal & General, one of the UK’s biggest insurers, has a consumer-focused main site. Among the product prompts on the home page is a panel of links to Our Other Websites: Legal & General Group plc, Adviser Centre and BP Centre.

Clicking on the latter leads to a log-in page on which the heading ‘BP Centre’ is picked out in green type above the sub-heading ‘Welcome to Legal & General’s BP Centre’, in blue type. The text explains that this is a website to support “Business Partners” with information and tools to develop the competitiveness of their business. To enter the site requires registration and log-in.

The Takeaway

Providing links from the main website to supplier and business customer sites makes sense as many of the target audience may come to the main site by default or discover the service through it. However, the opaqueness of Legal & General’s labelling of its centre for business partners works against the benefit of a prominent link from the home page. What is more, it is almost certainly confusing and possibly damaging.

The trouble for Legal & General is not just that the label ‘BP Centre’ is meaningless and therefore mystifying to the uninitiated, a common enough problem with terms that are familiar enough within a company that no one stops to view them with an outsider’s eyes. This could be redressed by spelling out the ‘BP’ element. And it is this element that raises a further potential issue because for most people in the UK the initials BP signify one of the world’s leading oil companies. The use of green type on the log-in page heading further compounds the confusion, especially as it is in the same shade used by the oil giant. That it is also the green used in Legal & General’s four-colour corporate palette explains how it comes to be used but not why, given the obvious correlation with BP’s logo style.

In short, what seems like a snappy idea in-house may play differently to an external audience. To avoid mystery or misinterpretation, step back and take a look from the user’s perspective.

First published on 06 October, 2005