How We Work - and Why It Works
It could affect reputation, compliance, trust or performance and be as much about what didn't happen as what did.
A beautiful film that nobody watches.
A campaign that legal pulls at the last minute.
A message that lands internally but contradicts what the market is hearing.
These aren’t anomalies.
They’re what happens when communication is treated as production rather than strategy.
The TOUCAN Method is how we make sure that doesn’t happen.
In regulated industries, the cost of getting communication wrong can be serious -
Our Approach
The Toucan Method
We start with the problem - because in regulated environments, the cost of getting comms wrong is real.
The TOUCAN method ensures it lands.
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More often than we'd like to admit, clients come to us without a clear answer to the most basic question: what does success look like?
Not "we need a film" or "we need an internal campaign." But: what do we need people to think, feel or do differently when this is over? And how will we know if it worked?
Without that answer, it’s impossible to know what the work is really trying to achieve - or whether it delivered. So before anything else, we define the shift. The target audience, the current behaviour, the desired behaviour, and what change would actually look like in practice.
Everything that follows is built around that anchor.
Target the Shift
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In an age of AI, we put experienced human thinking at the centre and give people a reason to care.
In highly regulated industries, the focus naturally falls on systems, processes, data and outcomes. Drug effectiveness. Regulatory compliance. Operational performance.
These things matter enormously. But none of them move people on their own.
We are deliberate about this: our work draws on the talent and experience of our people to understand the mindset of the people we're trying to reach. Not demographic profiles or audience segmentation frameworks - but genuine human insight into what someone cares about, what they're worried about, and what would actually make them pay attention.
The most sophisticated science or tech in the world still needs someone to care about it. Our job is to make that connection.
On a Human Level
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Compliance is the obvious risk. Politics is the one that kills projects.
Every communications leader in a regulated industry knows to involve compliance. What's less often discussed is everything else that can blow up a project.
We've seen it happen: a campaign that's delighting everyone in the room, content that's genuinely good, and then - at the last moment - it emerges that a key senior leader wasn't brought into the loop early enough. Not a compliance issue. A politics issue. One person who needed to feel ownership of the message and didn't, and suddenly the project is in crisis regardless of its quality.
Stakeholder mapping in regulated industries isn't just about approval chains. It's about understanding personalities, organisational dynamics, and who needs to feel heard before anything goes public. We have that conversation early - because finding out late can be time-consuming and expensive.
UNDERSTAND THE RISK
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One of the hardest parts of communication is knowing what to leave out.
The instinct in complex organisations is to put everything in. Nine messages, six priorities, four calls to action - because every stakeholder has something they need included, and nobody wants to be the one to cut it.
We push back on that. Not because we're being difficult, but because we've seen what happens to a film with nine messages versus one with three. The nine-message version gets half-watched and forgotten. The three-message version gets shared.
Part of what we bring is the confidence to shape a narrative that's understandable, memorable and repeatable - which sometimes means helping clients focus on the message that matters most.
That’s not a creative preference. It’s how people process information.
Craft the Story
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The right format follows the right problem, so we create formats people engage with.
Once we know what shift we're targeting, the format becomes a strategic choice rather than a default.
Sometimes it's a film. Sometimes it's a podcast. Sometimes it's a campaign across multiple channels. And sometimes - when we understand the problem properly - it's none of those things.
If a leadership team needs to align around a shared direction, and part of the problem is that those leaders haven't been in the same room for two years, no film solves that. An event does. The format has to follow the diagnosis, not the other way around.
We connect activation back to the original target at every stage. If the format doesn't serve the behaviour change, we say so.
ACTIVATE
NAVIGATE
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Organisations are drowning in messages. Morning, noon and night - everything, everywhere, all at once. Another email, another campaign, another all-hands recording nobody watches past the first three minutes.
Distribution is not the answer to this problem. Building something worth spreading is - and then navigating it deliberately to the people who need to receive it.
We started with a target: a specific shift in thinking, feeling or behaviour. Navigate is how we get there. Not by broadcasting and hoping, but by charting a course. Who needs to carry this message, and why would they want to? What does it need to feel like for a leader to share it with their team? What does it need to contain for a scientist to send it to a colleague?
When those questions are in the room from the start, distribution stops being something you have to force. It becomes the natural conclusion of work that was built, from the beginning, to travel.
Why This Order Matters
These six steps aren't interchangeable. Each one depends on the one before it.
You can't craft the right story without understanding the risk.
You can't activate effectively without having crafted a story worth spreading.
And you can't target the shift without first understanding the humans you're trying to move.
In regulated industries, where the margin for error is small and the consequences of getting it wrong are real, that sequencing isn't a methodology for its own sake.
It's how we protect your investment and make sure what we build actually lands.