Balfour Beatty
Delivering a strategic communications plan for a British infrastructure giant.
Designhouse were appointed by Balfour Beatty’s services division to assess an existing strategic communications plan and develop it as necessary.
After talking to clients, stakeholders, staff and management we found that the existing strategy was simply not understood by the target audience.
Our recommendation was to develop a new simplified message to cultivate and develop more unity across the five diverse business units. The new strategy was underpinned by a simple memorable line – ‘Together we deliver’. This resulted from talking with employees to find a common denominator that they could all genuinely embrace.
To communicate this across the business units we visited many of the active developments across the UK to gain a better understanding of the teamwork required to deliver these projects. During our visits we were able to discover what mattered to the individuals involved in these diverse projects.
Over 165 employees from management to workface operatives were interviewed, allowing them to talk frankly and their ‘conversations’ were recorded via video and portrait photography for use on future communications.
Iconography depicting the different business units; Gas and Water; Power; Rail; Living Places and Plant & Fleet were also developed along with guidelines to allow Balfour Beatty’s internal team to create additional indepth communications materials as required.