Navartis

The Brief

Navartis is a substantial business with real history behind it, more than fifteen years of technical recruitment across artificial intelligence, data centres, cyber security, renewable energy, nuclear, rail, telecoms and civil engineering, working out of offices in Doncaster, Leeds, Solihull, Houston and Düsseldorf.

A business of that reach generates a great deal of marketing need. There were sectors to speak to, regions to speak to them in, campaigns to run and a brand that had to hold together across all of it. What Navartis wanted was for someone to take the whole thing on and run it properly.

So the brief was about as broad as a marketing brief gets. It covered the thinking, the brand, the website, the campaigns and the day to day content, with one team accountable for the lot. It is the kind of scope that only works when the client trusts you completely, and Navartis did.

Full Outsourcing

Chris Cranshaw and Gavin Cranshaw led the work and effectively became Navartis’s marketing department.

The strategy came first, setting out who to talk to across three very different sectors and several regions, and how to do it in a way that suited a technical audience. From there Chris took on the virtual CMO role, which meant owning marketing decisions and keeping everything moving without sitting on the payroll.

Brand identity parameters followed. A business operating across that many sectors and offices needs clear rules on how the brand behaves, so everything produced anywhere in the group looks like it belongs to the same company. Halt set those parameters and applied them.

Website structure came next. With three sectors, a long list of disciplines, five offices and a services list covering payroll and IR35 advice as well as recruitment, the architecture of the site matters enormously. Halt worked out how it should be organised so a rail engineer in Leeds and a data centre client in Houston each find what they came for.

On top of all that sat the campaigns and the social content, running continuously across the sectors and regions the strategy had prioritised.

Mentoring & Handover

Following a period of change in the business, Navartis brought marketing in-house, and Halt’s job shifted from doing the work to passing it on.

That is a transition worth taking seriously. Halt had held the strategy, the brand parameters, the site structure and the campaign approach for long enough to know exactly what worked and why, and none of that is written down in a way a newcomer can simply pick up.

So Chris mentored the incoming internal marketing resource, taking them through the strategy and the reasoning behind it, the brand parameters and how to apply them, the campaign approach, and the practical running of the channels. They inherited a working marketing function with someone on hand to explain every part of it.

Navartis now runs its own marketing, built on foundations Halt put in place. That is a good outcome for a client, and a satisfying one to have delivered.