Our services

The College creates brand, reporting and digital communications strategies and executions for corporate clients.

What we do

We provide corporate clients with impactful brand, reporting and digital communications strategies. Committed to best advice and best execution, we defend and promote our clients' reputations as well as creating competitive advantage for them across their stakeholder groups.

Key audiences are typically the investment community, employees and recruits, governments and regulators, and commercial markets, including customers, partners and supply chain.

The College clients benefit from the sector expertise, specialists skills and resources of The College Group, an independent, unquoted company with revenue of around £40m, 300 people and 16 offices in Europe, Africa, Asia and the US.

The College has a team of 25 consultants and creative and is based at group headquarters in Royal Mint Court, by the Tower of London.

Our clients include fast-growing small- and mid-caps, as well as large global corporates. We usually advise the boards of companies and aim to make a tangible difference in a short period of time.

Often our mandates relate to corporate change, liquidity events such as IPOs and other fundraisings, mergers and acquisitions or repositioning.

Our process is to define the business need; gain deep insight through rigorous analysis of a company and its sector; devise and agree strategy; produce a powerful and distinctive creative platform; invariably roll out a production plan; and track and analyse success.

Strategy

Creating winning strategies for our clients' businesses

Our specialist consultants advise clients on their brand, digital and reporting strategies.

Our approach is to get a thorough understanding of our clients' businesses and what drives their industry sectors.

We use a variety of models and tools to frame our thinking and make the process clearly understood.

We encourage stakeholder workshops and collaborative thinking.

We are practical and pragmatic. From research and analysis we move quickly to insightful and practical recommendations.

If clients wish, we are able to execute strategies, ensuring that outputs are wholly consistent with the spirit of the brands we are developing.

Branding

Corporate brand and identity development adding real value

Invariably assignments are prompted by corporate change, such as an IPO, merger or repositioning requirements.

Investor scenarios might be: an unquoted company seeking a trade sale or a listing, needing to meet the needs of the investment community; a smallcap listed company wanting to improve its ratings; a midcap listed company engaged in M&A activity; or a FTSE 100 needing to reposition.

Clients are invariably engaged in change, growing or contracting, and adapting to fast-changing world markets.

A typical commercial scenario might be one where a company has grown internationally and needs a brand review and new strategy suiting its global position.

Whatever the circumstances, our role is to bring objectivity and insight, identify the essential, underlying task, and create a viable, winning brand strategy. This has to be rooted in the culture and fabric of our client's business and recognise the global context of key stakeholder groups.

Outputs of our corporate brand consulting include:

Company and sector analysis
Brand audit
Stakeholder analysis
Naming
Brand architecture
Mission, vision and values
Positioning
Communications framework
Planning
Corporate identity development
Logo design
Visual and verbal identity guidelines
Induction, training
Identity management

Reporting

Corporate reporting - keeping ahead of best practice

The College advises clients on their financial and corporate responsibility reporting.

Reporting has changed considerably since the 1980s, evolving from limited mandatory disclosure to today's more open and candid style, inspired in part by the US Management Discussion and Analysis format.

Our specialists work with clients' communications, financial and legal teams to agree an appropriate reporting strategy, often on a three-year cycle. This is set in the context of best reporting practice and takes into account corporate objectives, business strategy, SWOT analysis, peer group review, and performance metrics.

Our content team devises reporting themes, key messaging, and report structure and navigation. We provide advice on both financial and non-financial (sustainability) reporting, giving clients as much support as a client needs in content creation and development.

Increasingly reporting is conducted online as well as print. This trend has accelerated since the e-communications provisions were introduced.

When the strategy and content plan are in place, our user experience experts and information architects work closely with our design team to ensure that the right creative solution is adapted for varied media channels.

Typical components of our corporate reporting advice and execution:

Reporting strategy
Best practice advice
Theming, messaging and report structures
User experience and information architecture
Concept and visual design
Production management
Delivery of online and printed annual and sustainability reports
Tracking and evaluation

Digital

Delivering powerful brand communications online

Today's audience groups are all using screens, screens of different shapes and sizes. They're using myriad devices and applications to get information and communicate across their chosen networks.

Our role is to connect our corporate clients with their stakeholders and to make corporate brand communications work effectively across digital channels.

Our approach is to mobilise specialist expertise to meet the interesting challenges of channel planning, information architecture, user experience, content creation, visual design, and of course, the best technical platforms.

Our consultants play a key role in helping clients define and execute appropriate digital strategies and give shape to their online communications.

Given that much of our work is corporate and financial we have developed particular expertise in online investor relations.

On a tactical level, we are open to new technologies and new channels. We are not wedded to any particular platform. We establish at an early stage how our clients like to work; the technologies and channels they prefer; the levels of hosting security they require; the social media policies they have adopted.

We are creative and innovative but are risk-averse, preferring proven technologies and secure, robust hosting developments.

Digital disciplines at The College: