The Consultancy That’s Making Change Exciting for Its Clients
Why did London creative agency Creature launch a brand consultancy, White Crow, in 2018?
Director and founder Andrew Gibson puts it down to two things. The first, he warns, might seem duller than it is. So bear with him. “Creature has a slightly different model to most other ad agencies, which is generally quite a boring conversation, but in this context is quite an important one: we don't have permanent production in house,” he says. Here’s the interesting bit: “We had basically no agenda to necessarily make any adverts. So if a client came with a problem, we could solve it any way that we felt it needed to be solved.”
That put the agency on a direction of travel towards brand consultancy work, he explains. “While most of our work ended up in an advertising-shaped thing, we had quite a strong bunch of case studies of where we'd invented a product, done something with an internal team or found a solution to a question that wasn't necessarily advertising.”
Andrew, who is also chief strategy officer at Creature, found that when he and CEO Dan Cullen-Shute looked at all those case studies together, it looked impressive. “It became quite a compelling little proposition,” he says.
Zooming out, consultancies were buying creative shops like they were going out of style. “There was this idea that consultancies were going to come and take over advertising,” says Andrew. “We thought, actually, it could go the other way, too. We can do nearly everything they can do.”
But then came the second event that prompted the birth of White Crow: Creature pitched for a piece of consulting work, armed with these case studies, with a client the team already knew. The client loved the pitch, but felt that coming from an ad agency, they were worried that it would somehow lead to Creature trying to sell them some advertising. McKinsey ended up winning that work, which Andrew admits was “kind of galling.” That's when the idea of a standalone entity emerged, so clients won’t be worried that the ad agency doing their consultancy is trying to find a way to sell them some advertising.
Every year since then White Crow has grown, but quite quietly. “I don't think we've ever really gone out and gone: here's who we are and here's what we're all about,” says Andrew. “If you visit our website, you won't find an awful lot of useful stuff. Part of that is because sometimes we're not really allowed to say what we've been up to because of NDAs or whatever.”
But now White Crow is big enough to start cawing loudly. In September 2023 the consultancy added a design function led by Tim Green to its offer, launched a strategic AI tool called Impala, promoted Josh Dickins, who had joined in 2019, to head of consultancy and released Brand Safari, a tool for brands to understand their place in the marketplace.
More often than not, White Crow had been helping clients figure out how to make change possible within their organisation. But there’s a step beyond that. “At our best, we also make it exciting to the people who are there. Most people hear the word 'change' in a company and think it means a problem, or even losing their job.” Design helps to bring about a tonal shift with a visible change of direction for an organisation, he argues. White Crow had worked with Tim and his team already (he was already Creature’s head of design). So it was a no-brainer. “In a world where more and more design agencies are positioning themselves as consultancies, we've got a world-class design function and we've got a world-class brand consultancy. The two should come together,” says Andrew.
When Josh joined just over four years ago, the typical White Crow brief was a challenge about a brand, a product or about some combination of the two. As those challenges were overcome via White Crow’s consultancies, a lot of clients would realise that they needed a new visual identity or way of communicating this new incarnation of their businesses. “We sort of stumbled upon the experience of an end-to-end offer,” says Josh, “just because these things rolled into one another. When Tim and the team he's built joined the business, it was fairly clear that rather than 'By the way, we can even do that', we should show that we could include design from beginning to end.”
With more design thinking in the DNA of White Crow, it became more obvious that design consultancies too often push branding to the end. “It looks brilliant on a tote bag and a T-shirt and your logo's great because it's a representation of concentric circles to do with X, Y and Z,” jokes Josh. “What we realised is that brand is an input as well as an output. It's the meaning you invest into a business that then people can take out of it at the end. When we work with the design team on almost all of our projects it's taking that brand thinking from the start. So when it comes to bringing a visual identity to life it's sort of baked in from the start.”
Many consultancy briefs benefit from a design system, says Tim – “basically, not just logos anymore. We build out a pure brand where we have a cohesive idea which comes from strategy, that can roll out across a brand language and design language.”
Design responses to a consultancy brief aren’t responding to a creative concept, which gives them a different flavour. “You're responding to a fundamental strategic business concept,” says Josh. Rather than communication, the work responds to what the client’s business is designed to do. “What that means is when we lean into a brief for Tim and his team, it's not starting from a place of creative assumptions already made. It's starting from actually what needs to change in this organisation. Design suddenly grows teeth in that world. It starts to be a lever to make people think a bit differently, act a bit differently, even in the staff room or on the factory floor – talk about the company they work for differently.”
“With strategic brand consultancy work, it's the broader picture,” agrees Tim. “It's how the brand feels, what it looks like from a business card to the design of a building. And playing in that space fundamentally gives design a lot more flexibility and scalability.”
White Crow is also making a push on the AI front, with the development of Impala, which Andrew describes as ‘prompt architecture’ that allows the team to quickly extract propositions for creative work or a product, turn them into stimulus for research and then research that in the real world. “All of that in a week,” says Andrew.
He notes that the team has also prompted different generative AI models to analyse every piece of positioning work White Crow has done and then get it to mimic that style. “If you type into ChatGPT 'Write me a manifesto' it will write you a sort of communist-style manifesto,” says Andrew. “We found a way of getting different generative AI models to create work that looks, feels and smells like what we have done.
“There's definitely a human element into it as well: A lot of it then becomes about filtering and we take on almost a strategy director role in assessing what's there, picking the right ones and honing.”
Josh sees Impala as a useful tool to speed up prototyping. “Rather than working really hard as a team to get three potential options, it can come up with 10 different options that we can use as the starting point and throw ourselves back into something which works for the business. It's definitely not for every brief, but when there's limited time and pretty much a blank sheet of paper, it's a hell of a good start.”
Then there’s Brand Safari, which launched in January 2024 – a tool for brands that need to assess where they are, and where they need to be, to develop a clear strategy for success and impact, as well as define the activity that will deliver maximum ROI, but not at the expense of brand building. All of which is especially pertinent as we continue to face uncertainty in the marketplace. White Crow’s Brand Safari will diagnose the blockers of change in any business, identify the opportunities for growth and provide practical and implementable insights for the business and brand.
The first case study Andrew mentions is a household name in the UK – online gift card retailer Moonpig, who called White Crow to say: “Hey, I think we're accidentally the second biggest flower retailer in the UK. Help us figure out how to make more of that.” The team had to go about understanding the flower category, where Moonpig could play and how. “And ultimately how do you take someone who came for a card and ended up buying flowers and turn them into someone who came for flowers?” adds Andrew.
Josh’s opening line about White Crow’s next case is abrupt: “Trailstone are definitely not evil. But they have a problem where new graduates would go to their website to apply for a job and think they were joining an evil organisation.” The energy and commodities trading company came to White Crow, told them it was investing in an entirely new area of energy, which is about renewable management of energy flows and “they needed a brand which isn't just a shady name above a door somewhere,” says Josh.
The temptation would have been to add some zing to the website, but White Crow took its strategy to a larger scale. On the one hand Trailstone is trading natural gas in Texas and on the other hand managing wind farms in Germany. White Crow helped them come up with an overarching narrative that brought this together. The proposition became their slogan: 'making sustainable energy sustainable'. As Josh elaborates, “a business which is commercially smart enough to make renewable energy work.”
That narrative led to design work. “We realised we can't have a shop window that looks like a really shady kind of bunch of financiers.” White Crow created a new design system for the company and is still working with Trailstone today. The team recently finished an employee value proposition for them asking what it takes to attract new talent and different kinds of people across the world and have even worked on launching new corporate products. “It's a really good story of through the power of not being an insider in the world of energy, being able to see a much bigger, more cohesive picture and then that thinking kind of inspiring every step that the business has changed,” says Josh.
Then there’s the Woodland Trust. “Literally as far away from energy trading as you can possibly get,” says Josh. The organisation came to White Crow with three questions wrapped into one:
1. They wanted to grow fourfold by 2030.
2. They didn't know if they should be about animals or about climate change.
3. They wanted to be more diverse.
“We took a step back and said if they grow in line with the rest of the country then they’ll be more like the diverse country that Britain is,” says Josh. “Also, they're not a unifying thought. The thing we got to do with them was to help them realise they don't just deliver care for woods and trees; it's about the fundamental health of the UK. Healthy habitats, healthy ecosystems, healthy people even. We played around with the idea of being the UK's 'natural health service', but landed on a slightly less inflammatory tagline.” [‘Fighting for the health of people and planet with every tree.’]
Having been born from a creative agency, and with its design capabilities locked and loaded into the structure, White Crow is driven by the idea that it's making change possible and exciting. “Before maybe we made it just possible,” says Andrew. “We're bringing people along with it, getting workforces and target audiences interested, engaged and excited by what's going on. In a world where, at most companies, most people don't know what the corporate strategy of the company is, we're making it clear and compelling for them.”
