Project overview
At a glance
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Analysing culture through a competitive lens
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Identifying strengths, gaps and opportunities
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Creating a foundation to support their growth ambitions
Understanding the ambition
Somerset Bridge Group have a clear goal: to become a leading player in the UK car insurance market. They know that growth at this scale isn’t driven by products alone. It’s equally achieved by people and how they show up every day. The way people experience the culture internally defined how Somerset Bridge Group was perceived externally by partners and potential candidates. Somerset Bridge Group already had strong foundations. What they needed was a clear understanding of how their culture was showing up in the market, where it was cutting through and where it wasn’t being seen at all.
Understanding culture from the inside out
We started by building a deep understanding of Somerset Bridge Group’s current culture. We reviewed their recent Culture Review alongside existing brand awareness work, exploring how culture, values and behaviours were understood internally and communicated externally.
This allowed us to establish what Somerset Bridge Group stood for today and see how that story was being told.
Benchmarking against the market
To understand how Somerset Bridge Group compares to others in their space, we conducted a detailed competitor culture review across five key competitors. We analysed how each organisation articulated and brought their culture to life through:
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Purpose, vision and values
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Employee value propositions
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Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives
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Environmental and social commitments
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Career development, reward and benefits offerings
We looked at company websites, careers sites, LinkedIn pages, Glassdoor, Indeed and other publicly available information, allowing us to assess not just what competitors said, but how consistently those messages were delivered across different touchpoints.
From comparison to clarity
The outcome was a set of clear, actionable insights tailored specifically to Somerset Bridge Group’s ambition and context.
These insights meant we could:
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Identify which of Somerset Bridge Group’s cultural strengths were resonating externally, and which were being underplayed or overlooked
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Highlight meaningful learnings from competitors that could inspire, without diluting what makes Somerset Bridge Group distinctive
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Find opportunities to strengthen cultural alignment, bring people together and support Somerset Bridge Group’s journey of growth
What became clear was that Somerset Bridge Group had a strong culture and a compelling story. It just hadn’t been fully told yet.
A foundation for what came next
This work gave Somerset Bridge Group confidence in not only where they stood, but where they could go next. The culture competitor review became a foundation for the next phase of partnership - developing an employer brand that was unmistakably Somerset Bridge Group’s, built on truth, clarity and differentiation in a crowded market.
In their own words
In their
own words
Matt Robshaw, People Experience Lead, Somerset Bridge Group
“SMRS’ culture audit provided an invaluable insight into how we’re perceived as a business by potential candidates, and how we compare to our competitive set. The team were great to work with, developed a strong understanding of our needs, and delivered a clearly presented and actionable audit that has since become the cornerstone of the development of our employer brand and refresh of our corporate brand.”
Meet a few members of our team
