What makes us special?

Clients come to us because we work fast, and accurately. We research our briefs thoroughly. We ask searching questions. We pride ourselves on understanding our clients, their products and services, and their markets, at least as well as they do themselves.

And from that understanding, we create communications material that gets to the heart of the matter: material that has a profound resonance with the concerns of the target audience.

It’s that simple. Or is it?

Three things we are very good at: understanding technology, explaining strategy, and simplifying complexity.

Understanding technology

You can’t write coherently about things you don’t understand. Unless you understand what you’re writing about, you’ll simply parrot your briefing material, which adds no value at all and is lousy communication.

We’re not frightened by technology, and we’re not frightened to ask the questions we need to, in order to understand it properly. That’s helped us understand, and communicate about, complex telecoms technologies like SDH, ATM, DECT and WCDMA (for Ericsson). Enterprise software and e-business applications (for IFS). Micro-coding object-oriented programming systems (for Sun Microsystems). We could go on, but we won’t.

Explaining strategy

Understanding technology gives a solid foundation for communicating about it. But there is a bigger picture that needs to be explained as well.

Virtually all technological and industrial companies have, over the past couple of decades, experienced a profound shift in their business: away from supplying products and systems, and towards providing services, and forming long-term strategic partnerships with their customers.

We’ve helped Ericsson explain how telecom operators can migrate their fixed-line networks from single-service telephony to multi-service broadband; and how mobile network operators can optimize their strategy for building 3G networks, even when they don’t know what services their customers will want.

Another example: a major strategic shift for ABB, when it abandoned many large-scale, environmentally damaging power generation technologies, and presented a manifesto for a future power grid based on small-scale, distributed and clean power sources, controlled and co-ordinated using advanced information technology.

Simplifying complexity

A reasonably intelligent, lay audience should be able to understand what a company does, and why. And the more the audience understands, the better.

Even when you’re selling very advanced gizmos to white-coated geeks with multiple postgraduate degrees, there will come a point when the deal has to be approved by a financial or purchasing director … who needs to understand, in simple terms, what they’re buying and why it’s important.

In broader terms, companies have woken up to the concepts of the ‘social licence to operate’, and ‘stakeholder communications’. These recognize the value of goodwill throughout the community in maximizing the success of a corporation – and the importance of communication in creating that goodwill.

In other words, if you explain yourself clearly to everyone who wants to know, you’ll find it much easier to do what you want to do.

So once we’ve understood your technologies and your strategies, our mission is to simplify them, and explain them to ordinary people in terms they’ll understand.