Objective

Plato Partnership is a member-owned body in equity trading, a not-for-profit consortium of asset managers and investment banks working on market-structure problems. The engagement was to facilitate and organise all of Plato's communication and marketing, with the objective of broadening brand awareness and increasing engagement.

For a membership organisation, brand awareness is not a vanity target. Awareness is the recruitment mechanism: the audience and the prospective members are the same people, and the marketing channel is where they decide whether to join.

Creative response

Plato was one of that function's long-running accounts: the brand, the website design and build, the collateral, the social output and the newsletter programme were produced in-house over roughly four years.

• The Plato brand. The overarching brand and all associated elements, created from scratch.
• The website. Design, development and build on WordPress CMS, the central asset the rest of the programme fed.
• Marketing collateral. Brochures and event material for a body whose business happens largely in rooms.
• Social media. Content and day-to-day channel management.
• Newsletters. Design, distribution and the underlying database management, the last of which is why the open and click rates are meaningful rather than a small-list artefact.

The structure mattered as much as the outputs: one team held brand, build, content and distribution for four years, so the website was continuously fed rather than handed over and abandoned.

Results

4×, newsletter open and click-through rates above industry standard

~20%, average month-on-month traffic growth in the website's first year live

Social content is recorded as consistently exceeding industry-standard engagement. On the membership figure, the deck states both “30+ new international companies” and, in an earlier 2019 entry, “22 new international companies… including Barclays, BlackRock, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs”.

The work

Source: krismakuch.co.uk

Source: krismakuch.co.uk

The 2018 brand book sets out the identity against seven stated values, not-for-profit, evolutionary, equitable, collaboration, equality, stewardship and trust, and handles a second problem alongside the first: MI3, the research arm, needed to be built as a brand in its own right and held visibly separate from Turquoise, so that Plato's messaging and MI3's research each read as coming from where they actually came from. MI3 still runs today, with its own academic research programme and an annual conference.