Insights from Spirit Energy: the role of storytelling in corporate reputation
By Rowena Crowley
We are always interested in learning about our clients' challenges and industry insights. We recently caught up with Ross Davidson, Communications Director of Spirit Energy, to get his perspective on communication challenges and the role of storytelling in building reputation.
What are your biggest communication challenges?
One of the main challenges is getting cut-through. There is a lot of noise in our market so identifying what we want to be known for, sticking to our guns on that and being consistent with our messages is really important and can be a challenge.
From a societal perspective, our industry is quite rightly under pressure about what it's doing around a couple of big topics, including representing the communities where we operate and what our role is in contributing to tackling climate change. I think the industry has a lot to say on both of these areas, but for us as an industry and us as a business, are we explaining that and setting out our stall on those areas clearly enough?
How has the new website helped build Spirit Energy’s reputation?
It's really about laying down markers. At no point on our website do we say, 'This is Spirit Energy and this is the reputation that we want'. It’s more about laying down milestones for what makes us us. It’s about strong design, a really clear and consistent tone of voice and sharing our stories about our projects and people and using all of that to create a really important pillar of our reputation.
I've had a lot of feedback on the website and at no point has anyone said the website doesn’t really look like you. Having that reputation already in the market for doing things differently and setting ourselves apart from our competition is clearly the reputation that we have and the website underpins that and strengthens it as well. It’s a really important part of setting out the kind of reputation that we want.
What role do you think content has in building corporate reputation?
Watch Ross's response in this video or else you can read it below: