Corporate Communications Counsel
"Seek first to understand, then to be understood."
Stephen Covey
Our Approach to Client Counsel
We will never know your business as well as you do. But that's not our objective. Rather, we aim to provide value to your business by providing solid counsel grounded in extensive experience across multiple industries. Our expertise is in communication, not in second guessing your business decisions.
That's why we take a four phase approach to client counsel: Discovery, Design, Development and Delivery.
Discovery
Understanding the challenge
We begin by asking questions. Lots of questions. We seek to learn as much about your specific communications challenge as we can by talking to as many people as we can.
We find out about your corporate strategy to understand your objectives and the stakeholders that drive your success.
We research the communications environment you operate in.
And we look at what your competitors are doing as well as what your audiences expect from you and organizations like you.
Of course we don't engage anyone without your agreement. And we summarize our understanding in a document that we share with you to ensure that we have properly understood what you are asking us to accomplish.
Design
Identifying the path forward
Once you are satisfied that we understand the challenge, we design the initial strategic approach, ideally in direct collaboration with your team.
The strategic approach articulates the challenge and the measures of success. It identifies potential reference cases and different scenarios. And it details the stakeholders we need to engage to address the challenge.
We consider the factors we need to address, either from a positioning perspective or from the viewpoint of corporate behavior.
Finally we create a communications architecture with the right messaging, channels, integration and metrics to address the challenge.
Development
Planning for success
Once you are satisfied with the communications strategy, we begin to build it out into a comprehensive plan of action.
We believe in the value of communications from the centre. That means that the core narrative is consistent across all points of engagement with localization as required for different stakeholders or geographies.
In designing a communications plan we seek to find the most credible, direct channels to reach your stakeholders, which may or may not include mainstream media. Our objective is to shift perceptions, not necessarily to score media 'hits'.
Delivery
Creating your communications toolkit
With the strategy and plan reviewed and approved by you, we begin to create the collateral materials that you will need to deliver the plan. This communications toolkit is designed to be shared with the departments and individuals responsible for executing the plan.
The toolkit will be unique to every situation. At a minimum it will include a narrative structure, clearly articulated messages, a comprehensive Q&A document and a measurement framework.
As needed, we will also create any specific communications collateral that is required to deliver the plan, from media materials to document templates and executive talking points.
Signare is a counseling firm, not an arms and legs agency. However, we will work closely with your teams and agencies to deliver the plan that we have proposed.