Kevin Chesters of Harbour Collective gives us a look into their dynamic consultancy framework.
Can you give us a brief overview of your structure and some of the clients with whom you work?
Harbour is a brand communication consultancy.
We are a set of experienced senior partners who offer clients the best big brand thinking and, if required, can offer expert execution by channel – through our collective of independent specialist agencies.
Our clients include BT, John Lewis, Costa Coffee, Evelyn Partners, The Gym Group, McCarthy Stone, The Athletic, Away Resorts, Suicide & Co and Soldo.
Your elevator pitch please! How do you position your agency to a brand? Why should they work with you – what do you bring to the table?
We offer brands unrivalled experience and expertise to solve problems of all kinds.
Between us, the partners have led thinking on nine out of ten of the UK’s most valuable brands and over half of the world’s top 50 consumer brands.
Our promise is to offer the perfect blend of inspiration and useability, based on our unrivalled industry experience from both agency and client-side.
Our independence allows us to be totally objective in our response to a client’s brand communication task with no need or incentive to push one channel over another.
Once we’ve done the brand thinking part, we can draw from our selected pool of specialist agencies and individuals to bring thinking to life with capabilities spanning insight, brand ID, content creation, engagement, experience, immersive technology and production.
Can you talk us through a campaign and how you solved a problem for the client or made a difference to a brand?
REPOSITIONING & RELAUNCH OF MCCARTHY STONE
CONTEXT
McCarthy Stone (MCS) are the leaders in retirement living apartments in the UK. But retirement living isn’t a very well-known concept in the UK. Retirement is also a topic full of anxiety – it conjures up images of Werther’s Originals and endless repeats of Midsomer Murders, and the smells of boiled cabbage and Dettol. Few people are even aware of retirement living apartments, let alone the benefits. And this can lead to people mistaking it for a care home (the one thing they would do anything to avoid). We weren’t redefining a category; we were defining one.
SOLUTION
MCS is not a construction company, it is a lifestyle provider. We had to move McCarthy Stone from being a provider of retirement living properties to make it a brand which creates the conditions for people to live the life they want to live as they get older. The positioning – Life, Well Lived – is a promise, not a proposition or communications idea. It is the north star from which all behaviours flow – from product to advertising, from events to promotions.
Age is the context, but life is the message; the life you want to live if you are lucky enough to get old.
IMPACT
We developed many campaigns across 2020, as Covid had its biggest impact. This has now developed into a full revamp of all comms in 2021 in advance of a full ATL launch in 2022, including TV and OOH.
The positioning is now informing everything across McCarthy Stone’s business from PR to product design.
Without giving away your secret sauce of course, what does your roadmap for growth look like? Is it, for example, geographic expansion (if location is still a thing), or joining one of the growing indie agency networks? Developing more project work for other clients?
Our plan is to continue to stay small and focused.
Our secret sauce relies on access to our senior partners, so any growth will be based on recruiting the right senior partners and/or continuing to look for expert partner agencies or individuals to add to our specialist knowledge.