from b2c dream to b2b identity: a reflection with vive

Vive delivers the most advanced pension solution to date. By combining pension accrual, investing and wealth management, their clients get live insight into where they stand. Through their app, people gain access to their investment engine, which offers strategies in a straightforward way and lets them adjust those strategies to personal needs.

the blossoming and growth of vive

By late 2026, they'll have been around for five years. What started as a B2C proposition, with an identity firmly wrapped around that idea, started to chafe at a certain point. The product and the direction Vive was moving in called for something else: a B2B story. That meant a fundamental repositioning around one core idea, future money, alongside a new website. Vive grew from sustainable and personal into a technically strong product with a smooth service experience.

A repositioning moment like this comes around rarely. If you take Vive's word for it, once every ten (!) years. The choice to invest in a website following the renewed visual identity was therefore an easy one. Because what you are should align with what you project, otherwise you end up reinforcing the wrong story.

For Vive, we rebuilt their existing Webflow website to reflect the new visual identity by G2K. What began with two pages eventually grew into a modular system. A foundation that has stayed close to the brand vision and is now more alive than ever. Together with Nicholas van der Veere, we look back at what that development trajectory delivered and how the role of the marketer relates to digital today.

what digital and marketing challenges are you running into?

For an organisation like Vive, the challenge is no longer setting up the system: that's in place. The challenge is keeping up. Webflow, AI, automation: everything changes by the week, and the tools you deploy today are different again tomorrow. For a small marketing team with many stakeholders, that means constantly weighing things up: what do I take on myself, what do I outsource, and where do I invest time learning something that might already be obsolete in a year?

how do you see your role as a marketer changing within digital in 2026?

The role is shifting, in ways you may find unexpected. AI taking over work is one part of it. The bigger question is what you do with the space that frees up. In that, I notice the marketer's role shifting much more from producing to directing. In Webflow, you now have tools for generating meta titles, meta descriptions and automatic translations based on the context within your project.

That development within AI is of course broader, and it takes away most of the small, time-consuming tasks and the endless copy-paste workflow. That might sound like less work, though it actually broadens your role: you spend time curating visuals, designing pages, structuring texts. More high-level work that previously got left undone because you were too busy with execution like writing copy.

You're writing less yourself and curating more. That creates more room for other things, like visuals, page designs, structuring texts, rather than only writing.

Webflow plays right into that. The way the platform has evolved over the past few years. From lots of custom work with endless variables to reusable components, standardised template pages and a design system with guardrails. As a result, a marketer is increasingly able to fix things themselves.

Adjusting copy, building pages, trying out variants. That now happens without development being involved, because we've grown into a modular system. Our CMS has fields with carefully considered limits, and the design system therefore puts up its own guardrails. It also keeps visuals in mind, for instance by setting image sizes and styles. As a result, image curation is always on-point. With constraints, you can be highly creative in Webflow without breaking the website, and that's exactly the speed and freedom you need as a marketer today.

Speed is important for autonomy. Sales pulls at you, operations pulls at you. Having to wait three weeks for something is frustrating, because you (and the organisation) want results.

Within that broader directing role, the relationship with external parties also shifts. The better the system is set up, the more you can handle yourself and the higher the bar for what you expect from an external party. You bring them in for the work that requires technical depth, for thinking along on strategy and architecture, beyond the helpdesk role for small tweaks that should have been within reach long ago.

in what other ways is the division between marketing and development shifting?

The shift is mainly about the line becoming clearer between the two. Previously, a change to the website almost always meant a detour via development. A well-set-up system gives marketing the autonomy to act on its own. It also exposes something else: development today builds more than a website. It lays down the infrastructure of your visual identity. A foundation you work with daily as a marketer once a rebranding is complete.

And precisely because marketing takes on more itself, the reach of that system becomes visible. If that foundation is properly carried through, you can extend everything to search, socials and other places where you put your communications out into the world. The reverse works just the same way. Ultimately, what matters is that recognition persists across different channels and that there's unity. At Vive, that was previously a bit more subdued, which meant it stuck less.

when did you realise the difference between building a website and building a system?

Our project started with 2 pages: the homepage and the 'how it works' page. The components were intended only for those pages. It wasn't a redesigned modular system, and we didn't want one at that point. In retrospect, we'd have wanted that earlier in the process, certainly with what we now know about Webflow. It took us some time to figure that out, because we essentially skipped the functional and visual design. In hindsight, we eventually ran into the fact that not every component fits everywhere. We hoped to solve that by shifting things around and adapting new pages based on the foundation we'd set up.

During the process, internally we looked at the structure too late and intended to port pages over 1:1. We quickly realised together that we'd later need to adjust and rearrange quite a bit of content in the CMS, because it turned out things no longer fit everywhere properly. Within that, schemas and SEO-related work could also have been factored in more strongly from the start. On top of that, we had to revisit and adjust visuals, because they didn't always fit within new components anymore (old images don't always fit a new website).

If you skip those steps, you end up with a kind of design system and component struggle where everything has to be adapted to it. The danger of such an approach, and of not thinking in a system while redesigning your website, is that you eventually get a sort of Frankenstein held together at every seam. Apart from the delay it causes you in the short and long term.

Renewing makes sense with a new identity, so you also want to carry all those renewal steps into your existing website. It then helps to get to the core with an internal group by determining what you want to keep and what you'll let go of. What works? What doesn't? Who is it for? And what do you want to tell? From there, you start designing the navigation structure and translate all your insights into a number of core components that fit your new visual identity. After that, you can look at pages that lend themselves to modularity, like blogs or author pages, and think about how to build that with, for example, components or slots. And according to Nicholas, that's something you need studio aardig for.