A rebrand that became a repositioning

RB Health & Safety had been taken on by new owners with bigger plans. They wanted to move on from the old name, present a growing range of services properly, and make it far easier for customers to find the right course. They handed us an outline of the services and the freedom to shape the rest, the name included.

The business that launched as MAST Safety was a version of the one that had been bought. Some consultancy, and a hard focus on training. That was the right shape for the time, and the first site was built to suit it.

The decision to take a London office at Canary Wharf was about reach. A central base makes the growing client base across the South East far easier to serve, and it makes getting to a client's premises a straightforward thing rather than a day out.

It was also the moment to stop extending the old site. The services now run well past health and safety into HR, and they are delivered to offices, education and care, hospitality, retail, manufacturing, warehousing and property as much as to construction. None of that was what the original site had been built to say.

So the new site is organised around what MAST actually does now: consultancy, fire risk, HR services and training, with the sectors named rather than implied, and retainer tiers for clients who want ongoing cover rather than a job at a time.

There is a photograph on almost every health and safety website in the country: a worker in a hard hat on a building site. It is a perfectly good photograph, and on a page about construction audits it does its job well.

The difficulty is that MAST does that same audit for a care home, a bar, an office and a theatre. Somebody running a residential home who lands on a page fronted by scaffolding sees an industry that is not theirs, and quietly decides the service is not for them either. The picture has told them something untrue before a word of the copy has been read.

So the service pages carry no stock imagery. An image can only ever show one of the settings a service applies to, and picking one means excluding the others. The words can describe all of them, so on these pages the words are what does the work.

What sits there instead is the sector itself. The homepage names the kind of workplace MAST looks after and cycles through them, construction sites, offices, education and care, hospitality, manufacturing, retail, warehousing, so a visitor sees their own industry named rather than somebody else's pictured.