How We Work - and Why It Works
Our Approach
Most agencies start with the deliverables. We start with the problem. That distinction matters more than it sounds.
In regulated industries, the stakes of getting communication wrong are real - reputations, relationships, regulatory exposure, and the confidence of the people an organisation needs most.
A beautiful film that nobody watches, a campaign that compliance pulls at the last minute, a message that lands with employees 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.
T - Target the Shift
Define the behaviour change you actually need.
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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, there's no brief worth responding to - and no way to evaluate whether the work 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.
O - On a Human Level
In an age of AI, we put experienced human thinking at the centre and give people a reason to care.
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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.
U - Understand the Risk
Compliance is the obvious risk. Politics is the one that kills projects.
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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 is always more expensive than finding out first.
C - Craft the Story
Our job is sometimes to say no, and it takes skill to make it clear and memorable.
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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 politely 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 telling a client that their most important message needs to be the only message, at least for now.
That's not a creative preference. It's how communication actually works.
A - Activate
The right format follows the right problem, so create formats people engage with.
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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.
N - Network
The best communication spreads because of how it's built.
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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.
We have the conversation about networks and channels early - not as a media planning exercise but as a fundamental question: 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 communication is constructed with those questions in mind from the start, distribution becomes something that happens naturally rather than something you have to force.
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.
Want to see the method in action? Explore our case studies.