My Brand and Me: ClearPeople and The Crown Estate

THE SECTORS

ClearPeople works with a wide range of sectors, spanning legal and professional services to business to business and charities. All these sectors have different objectives, different pain points and different happenings internally in their organisation and externally in the wider world which directly impacts their activity. We don’t have a different approach to our client’s based on their brand’s specific industry - we’re well versed in distinct areas of expertise, from technical development and strategic consultancy to creative design and user experience - and these specialisms are transferable across all industries. It’s the sector knowledge required to serve these industries well which differs from client to client.

Every brand is different, even if they’re in the same sector. So even if we understand a brand’s sector, it doesn’t mean we’ll immediately understand a new client within that sector. For every new brand we work with, we’ll get to the heart of their business with our discovery phase, immersing ourselves in their world to understand exactly how they work, who their audience is and more importantly, where we can add value and enhance their relationship with their target audience.

To us, a client relationship is at its best when you understand their business completely. For example, one of our biggest client bases is the legal sector and with big legal changes like the Jackson Reform and the Legal Services Act coming into play in recent years, their impact fundamentally changed the legal landscape and how it operates.

Our healthcare and pharma clients have been affected by an industry with rising demand and employment decreases, and the likes of the University of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University and West Thames College are in a sector that is increasingly learning how technology can give them competitive advantage and cut costs out of their operations.

We’ve got an excellent account management and consulting team who keep up to speed with such industry developments so we can best advise our clients on solutions to their problems. We’ll tailor our own events to speak specifically to their needs and ensure we’re producing relevant content and messages that are current and leading-edge.

We’re in the digital business and it’s constantly evolving. Technological advancement is all about making life easier, processes simpler, and businesses more efficient and so we like to work with clients who embrace this change. Regardless of sector, our approach with clients is to be pioneers of digital, working with technology, processes and people to transform their business. We believe in partnership first, in becoming an extension of our clients’ marketing, IT and commercial teams and truly collaborating with them. For all our clients we aim to challenge the norm, think creatively and achieve digital business transformation.

THE CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS

We maintain strong and lasting client relationships with big brands like Fred Perry and Vodafone by employing staff with expertise in consultancy, user experience, design and development of Internet, Intranet, Extranet and Document Management systems. No matter the sector, ClearPeople works with all its brands with 4 key values at its core:

Business Value - Everything that ClearPeople do is focused on meeting client’s business objectives and providing value back to them.

Distinctly Creative – ClearPeople believe that creativity is more than just pretty design and snappy copy; creativity is about unique moments of delight; great UX tells the user that you care about them and that quality matters.

Innovative Thinking – We are proud technology geeks and demanding user experience experts – we combine this with our experience across businesses to harness technology in new and exciting ways, exceeding client expectations.

Customer Experience – For ClearPeople, customer experience ensures our clients are treated as Kings and Queens and have a great experience with us from their first touch point, proved by an 85% repeat business and referral rate.

One brand story we’re particularly proud of is that of The Crown Estate (TCE). Our relationship with them has been ongoing for around four years and has seen us rejuvenate their entire IT infrastructure and build an award-winning technical solution which has saved them up to £2.2m per year in hosting costs alone.

The Crown Estate is a commercial property organisation charged with managing an £8billion portfolio on behalf of the nation. This includes urban real estate, rural land and almost all of the UK’s seabed. Due to its ownership of the seabed The Crown Estate plays a crucial role in enabling the advancement of the UK offshore renewable energy industry.

When we first met TCE at an event in 2010, we were approached to help their Information Services team with some technical consulting. Being on-site in their offices quite regularly led to an introduction with their Head of information Services and further discrete pieces of work. Notably impressed by the positive impact of the work we were doing for their organisation, our work expanded into two major projects, one being the development of the Marine Data Exchange which provides crucial support for those looking to develop in the marine environment as well as enhancing the sustainability of marine businesses.

This particular project saw The Crown Estate face the challenge of managing up to 1 petabyte of data originating from various sources and ClearPeople delivering a highly scalable solution to deliver this huge quantity of content to the public, as well as saving more than 7,500 hours of TCE’s staff per year compared to the previous manual process.

From ClearPeople’s perspective, it is evident that understanding the business your agency is working with is key. Despite differing sectors, with different goals, knowledge within the sector is of the utmost importance along with applying a succinct business philosophy that can be applied from sector to sector, brand to brand.