Experian Case Study: bringing clarity to a 200-year-old brand
25 Nov 2025
DACRE worked with the B2B UK&I team to breathe new life into its positioning and to collaborate with their senior leadership team to define their 5-year mission. Helping steer the brand into its next evolution of growth and shaping the culture that will help enable it.
Walking the floors
We spent time in Experian’s Nottingham and London offices, listening to the different departments and people that make Experian who they are today. The one thing that kept cropping up was the idea that “Experian is the best kept secret”.
Many know them for their credit scores and reports but they offer “much more”. They have over 120+ products that power and protect many of the products and services we all use day-to-day.
The problem being… people just don’t know it’s Experian behind it all.
Finding the story under the surface
Defining a proposition is really about bringing out the story, one centred around the value the business creates. Stripping back assumptions and distilling down to what makes it distinct.
Using the story as a basis of why that business matters: to their customers, partners and employees. Then bringing that to life across the business and externally.
When we spoke to the different teams across Experian, we got a sense that there was real pride in the work they did. When we asked the question in the middle of a workshop, who felt proud to work at Experian, everyone in the room, without hesitation, raised their hand.
We found this too in what their customers had to say about them. They cared, they took pride and that their products provided real value.
It’s easy in proposition projects to either quickly drink the Kool-Aid of a business or be overly judgmental. Our role, especially to start with, is one of a doctor: listening to the symptoms, understanding and trying to piece together and get to the root cause of why we’re where we are today.
It’s about trying to get under the surface of the bullet points on a strategy doc. Lifting the curtain of the formalities of the corporate world and large glass offices.
It’s getting to the stuff that people say down the pub or when they get home from work. The stuff that makes their job more difficult and normally their lives of their customers.
The stuff that gets in the way of creating the maximum amount of value… in all its different forms.
Data, tech and change
DACRE’s whole prop is geared towards working with brands in moments of change. For Experian, their moment of change is in unifying their offering. They have some of the best and most trusted data around and unmatched tech that brings it all to life.
But they don’t have a unified proposition that tells that story in a compelling way. Moving them away from language that leans inherently inwards to one that puts customers and partners front and centre.
Our litmus test for the proposition was if we could explain what Experian did down the pub. It was an analogy that came from one of the workshops we led.
We ran with it as we would ensure our work was clear, succinct and to the point. It’s very easy to get mixed up in corporate jargon, acronyms and competitor noise.
It needed to be something that people could get behind and spread. Working for the sales team when they’re meeting prospective customers, all the way to someone delivering a keynote at a conference.
We knew if we could boil it down to its simplest ‘pub’ form, that people nodded along to, engaged with and understood, we knew we had the essence of the story.
Intelligence in motion
We landed with this idea of ‘Intelligence in motion’.
Intelligence being a key term in the age of human and artificial intelligence, doubling down on what Experian does best, ‘connecting data and tech with their knowledge and expertise’.
It’s not one or the other. It’s the human and the machine.
It was also about confidence. Confidence enables businesses and people to make better decisions and create better outcomes. Giving businesses the confidence to decide ‘where to focus, who to trust and how to win and keep customers’.
Providing the ability to ‘think sharper, move faster, and go further’. Providing businesses a competitive edge, being the enabler to them ‘Outsmarting, outperforming and outmanoeuvring’ their competition.
Embedding it into a 5-year mission
The senior leadership of an organisation are the one that can ignite change.
This is why when we do proposition work, this group of people are critical to its success and involvement throughout. These are the people who are its disciples, who will help spread and embed it across their teams, functions and regions.
To kick this off, we ran a workshop for the UK&I C-Suite, to not only embed the new proposition but align it across B2C and B2B. Aligning it to a 5-year mission, bringing together their business plan, KPI’s and all their different departments.
The mission is the driving force behind everything.
DACRE's role is to bring clarity to what sometimes feels like a daunting task, when a business is trying to navigate the short-term, to look up and see the path forward over the long-term.
Where are we going and why? What does this mean to our customers? What does it mean for our people?
The goal of this type of workshop is getting people to work together under the same shared goal. As DACRE, we’re enabling this to happen rather than coming with the finished article; we’re the diplomats and ushers in the room.
The path of positioning and defining the next 5 years isn’t a straight forward, neatly laid path. That is ok and to be expected. The debates, tension and collaboration are always where the best work comes from. It’s the hive mind helping form new ways of seeing and fresh perspectives. All departments under one roof, going in the same direction.
The real test of the work
The real test of the proposition and a 5-year plan, as obvious as it sounds, is over the long term, showing itself in the numbers and NPS scores.
This can be hard when we’ve become so used to short-termism. But with propositions and missions, if done well, they not only have an impact, normally at first subtly, over the short-term but the real impact comes over time as they compound.
Over time strengthening the brand and ultimately the business. Translating little day-to-day actions, under a shared mission and purpose, over time into a large transformational impact over years and decades.
This is always what underpins our approach to this type of work. We believe change isn’t a large leap but thousands of little steps.
How Experian finds working with DACRE
“DACRE has been a fantastic find in the agency world. Their smart thinking, structured approach and thorough analysis plus flex and agility make them a team I would work with again and again. They quickly understood the business and read the room extremely well to give us really valuable insights to quick turnaround times. They are also a total pleasure to be around as people - a winning combination. I couldn’t recommend them enough”
Helen, Head of Brand, Experian