Where experience adds commercial value

Andrew Arends: CEO Camaxys

'We are delighted to have Smith Ltd working with us. Health and Safety is a very fragmented market and we need to communicate more effectively our core messages and these need to be matched with a unified approach to design and Smith Ltd was quite simply breathtakingly good.'

Good design companies will polish and refine the way you look and speak to your stakeholders, and they will add design value. The really good design companies will bring more to the table, get you thinking about what is possible and, sometimes, instigate business opportunities, taking you into new or 'un-owned' commercial directions.

Historically, health, safety and environmental management (HSE) had largely been a departmental responsibility in an industry serviced by small technically driven software companies. This regional software company was no different, producing product 'data sheets', set in-house, designed in Word and wiro-bound by the CEO's PA.

Pushed through limited channels to IT managers they came to us for advice on sharpening up their collateral.

We began, as we always do with new clients, by researching them and their business. What we found was an evolving commercial environment presenting real business opportunities. Successive high profile accidents and prosecutions against large companies (e.g. Railtrack and Jarvis) meant HSE issues were starting to find their way into the boardroom. Increasingly, health and safety performance was seen as indicative of the culture and corporate governance of a business. A business that fails to address these issues may find itself not only on the wrong end of very serious charges, but also feel a very real impact on recruitment, retention, customers, reputation and ultimately their bottom line.

With this as background, we identified new opportunities for our client, realigning their offer from a product-based software company to a risk management consultancy that large multi-nationals could trust.

Supporting the new position, we used a challenging, direct style of copywriting to lead the change in their marketing communications. Typographically bold, no-nonsense condensed caps were chosen to match the exclamatory yet authoritative content of the copy lines.

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