Coutts Consulting Group Case Study
Challenge:
Coutts Consulting Group plc (CCG) is Europe’s largest and the world’s third largest career management and development organisation. The company provides a raft of services, from outplacement to executive mentoring, for blue chip clients across industries spread through the public and private sectors. With head offices in London, Coutts Consulting Group has a network of 19 offices across the UK, as well as offices in Europe, the US and Japan.
When K+R was taken on, CCG had a very low profile compared to its three most significant competitors in the UK. Media relations and PR activity was fragmented via a number of small agencies around the country working at local level and there was no cohesive strategy in place to achieve corporate or service objectives. K+R was tasked to develop a national profile for the company, to promote its UK wide capability and to generate coverage for new products and services, including management training, mentoring, career advice and employee assistance programmes.
Strategy:
A key component of the strategy was to engage employers directly by originating information and expert comment on a range of issues of immediate interest to them and their HR directors and managers. Second, we made the company become much more proactive in generating face-to-face meetings with key decision makers and buyers by introducing an integrated marketing and PR plan encompassing seminars, exhibitions, media partnerships and advertising.
Tactics:
K+R implemented a media relations programme which included a proactive and reactive Press Office, building relationships with key journalists through a programme of briefings with the CEO and Marketing Director and generating news and feature stories. These included imaginative looks at topics such as electronic CVs, managing violence in the workplace and job interview techniques. We also took the company’s bank of client statistics and structured a series of high impact releases on UK salaries and job settlement prospects, turning this into an annual survey.
Results:
Coutts started to equal and then outperform its competition in both profile and media coverage. The amount and quality of national coverage rose significantly with no detriment to regional coverage. The advertising value equivalence of press coverage achieved over the first year was 17 times higher than the fees paid. In addition, one article in the Times alone generated business enquiries from the HR department and CEO of three household names about one of the c ompany’s new training courses.
