Your investors hear one version of the story. Employees hear another. Journalists, regulators and community groups each get their own, assembled by different teams at different times. None of it is wrong, exactly; it just never adds up to one organisation saying one thing. The cost arrives slowly: announcements that land flat, employees who can’t repeat the strategy, stakeholders who hesitate because what they heard last month doesn’t match what they’re hearing now.
Corporate communications is the discipline that closes those gaps. A corporate communications agency sets the strategy first: what the organisation needs each audience to believe, which messages carry that belief, who says what to whom and in what order. BIG is an integrated PR, marketing and digital agency with roots in crisis and reputation work; our corporate communications accounts are led by senior people who advise CEOs and boards, then stay involved. Most of this work is retained. DNV has used BIG as its global PR agency for more than 15 years.
Corporate communications clients on our published work include Cerulean Winds and DNV.
The strategy work: deciding what has to change before anyone drafts a press release.
Alignment work for organisations whose internal and external stories no longer match.
Counsel for the moments where the story is decided at the top.
Cerulean Winds needed stakeholder support for the Aspen Floating Offshore Windfarm ahead of statutory offshore consultation and a marine licence application. Consultation is where energy projects slow down; a community, an industry body or a regulator hearing an inconsistent story can cost a development its timetable. BIG built the message strategy per stakeholder before the statutory clock started: stakeholder mapping, targeted messaging, a public consultation event, a briefing for Scottish Fishermen’s Federation members and preparation for media requests. The client credits that groundwork with building “our profile and relevance with key stakeholders”, whose support it describes as “instrumental in securing our seabed leases”. When the next stage of a project depends on several audiences saying yes at once, this is the discipline that aligns them.
DNV has used BIG as its global PR agency for more than 15 years, across its energy systems, maritime and cyber security businesses. The job is consistency at scale: leadership communications, crisis support and report launches that carry the same story to press in every market. The annual Energy Transition Outlook launch has generated 20 million opportunities to see, a press conference attended by 40 international journalists, seven one-on-one CEO interviews on a single launch (including The Guardian) and 30,000 report downloads. Relationships last that long when the counsel holds up: the same senior people, on the same account, year after year.
We ask what needs to change (trust, stakeholder support, market position) before we ask what to announce, so the messaging serves a commercial outcome from the first draft.
Our roots are in crisis and reputation work; the people who set your strategy are the ones counselling leadership when it’s tested. DNV’s 15-year relationship is what that looks like over time.
Success measures are agreed when the strategy is, against reputational and commercial indicators, so the account is never marking its own homework with coverage counts.
PR, marketing and digital sit under one roof here, so the story agreed at strategy stage doesn’t fragment when it reaches channels run by separate suppliers.
BIG Partnership has been a trusted partner to Cerulean Winds and our supply chain alliance since the very early days, building our profile and relevance with key stakeholders and their support was instrumental in securing our seabed leases.
Laura Jarvie, Head of Scotland, Cerulean Winds
When investors, staff and press each hear a different version of your organisation, strategy is the fix. Get in touch to start aligning what each of them hears.
A corporate communications agency plans and manages how an organisation speaks to all of its audiences: media, investors, employees, communities, regulators and government. The work covers communications strategy, message development, stakeholder engagement, internal communications and counsel to senior leadership. Where a PR agency’s centre of gravity is earned media coverage, a corporate communications agency is accountable for the whole story holding together across every audience and channel.
A PR strategy process starts with the commercial or reputational problem: what the organisation needs to change and which audiences hold that change. It then moves through an audit of current perceptions, audience and stakeholder mapping, message development, channel and spokesperson planning and an agreed set of success measures. The output is a strategy every team can execute against, with messages settled before they meet a journalist, an investor or an employee town hall.
Consistency comes from a single narrative: one agreed account of who the organisation is, what it’s doing and why. Each audience then gets its own expression of that narrative, adjusted for what they care about, never a different story. A message architecture signed off at leadership level gives every team the same source material, so the version an employee hears matches the version an investor reads.
In almost every case, yes. Employees read the same coverage your customers do; they notice when the internal account differs from the external one. Announcements travel in both directions: a staff briefing leaks, an investor statement circulates on the intranet. Treating internal and external communications as one discipline, with one narrative behind them, removes the gap that erodes trust on either side.
PR earns coverage and visibility; it answers how to get the right story told. Corporate communications sits a level up: it decides what the story is, keeps it consistent across audiences and advises leadership through the moments that could change it. If your audiences are hearing different versions of the organisation, or a major announcement, transaction or restructure is ahead, that’s corporate communications work rather than a media relations brief.
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