Katch was originally launched in London before we opened another flagship office in Dubai. We are driven by a collective mission to bring creativity and an all-important personal touch to everything we do – creating a real impact for our clients in the process. Our tagline, ‘We create. We communicate’ is inspired by our ability to break away from traditional communications to bring a strategic yet creative edge to our work while making the maximum noise for clients and generating worthwhile engagement. I founded Katch as a family business. Even though the agency has grown considerably over the past decade, we still retain our family ethos, treating every team member as part of our extended family.
When something happens with a client’s overall budget, the first thing that company does is scrutinise the added resources they are utilizing; this usually results in cuts being made to their marketing and communications budgets. However, the brands that have continued to do well over this challenging period are actually the ones that have adapted their marketing strategies, rather than cutting their budgets, to talk directly and regularly to their audiences.
Katch has also had to do the same. We used the downtime we were given due to the pandemic to analyse where we were as an agency and where we wanted to go. We looked at our overall service offering and did a lot of consultancy work for our clients, auditing their brands, and working out new paths to grow their potential markets. We worked on digital experiences a lot more, exploring new and innovative ways to grow current audiences, target new consumers, and introduce wider client bases. A lot of our hospitality clients, for example, embraced the delivery side of their businesses in 2020, so we adopted their brand communications to engage with delivery-focused audiences.
It is so important not to panic at a time like this. Instead, it’s about retraining, refocusing, and growing. Because our team is like a family, with some of us having worked together for over ten years, we could openly and honestly discuss how best to handle the pandemic’s impact on our business so that everyone could keep their jobs. This collective openness and honesty across the company enabled us to overcome some tough challenges and really show each other what ‘being a team’ is all about.
We used the pandemic downtime to retrain our staff and do our research. For the PR team, we worked on looking at new markets and analysing our clients’ competitors and our own as well to gain a much more comprehensive understanding of what was working for those brands and what wasn’t.
We also significantly increased our output of op-eds, advice articles, and blog posts to build our presence across the market. We updated our credentials and case studies and built new elements into our website so that potential clients could really get a better feel for what we offer and what we have achieved across various industries to date.
We linked our London and Dubai office and encouraged a more collaborative approach between both locations so that the teams really worked together moving forward. This linking improved the company’s creative output and strengthened our relationships, both as a team and with our clients. All of these changes, while small, have made huge differences – enabling us to emerge more robust as a team and a company.
We are expanding our digital services and introducing many more disruptive services to maximise our clients’ digital presence across the board. We are working with VR, AR, and AI, as we feel that these technologies are now being embraced across numerous industries, and, more importantly, services built around them are here to stay. We are also exploring new social platforms across the social media sphere, from video sharing to gaming culture.
On the creative design side, we have always been heavily involved in hospitality branding and concept building, but we have now started to design our own concepts, working on developing brand identities from scratch, including menu design and audience strategy. Even though we are approaching such projects from a design angle, we are always striving to ensure an engaging communications strategy is at the forefront of these ideas, which I believe brings something really different to the market.
I think the Covid-19 pandemic has whittled down people’s tolerance for average services. No one has the time or the budget to settle for average services. In the past, we used to be criticised for being a bespoke agency. However, we are now being sought after for it, as more and more clients embrace our bespoke approach. We don’t want to be a huge agency and look at every client as just another set of numbers. We want to provide a high-quality, personalised service for each and every client, regardless of the size of their company. This is why our clients feel a sense of loyalty to us; they know we go above and beyond for them. Now is a time when brands need agencies like us more than ever because they care about their brands and want their marketing and communications agencies to care just as much.
