About Clarksons
Clarksons is a global shipping company with more than 2,100 employees in 67 offices across 25 countries. They help companies move goods around the world by sea. They link people who own ships and people who need to transport things like oil, gas, or containers. They also offer research, advice, and digital tools to help their clients make smarter decisions in shipping and trade. With such a wide area of expertise, creating content that’s consistent, on brand, and easy to manage was a growing challenge, especially as more teams started making their own materials.
Intro
67 offices, 25 countries. Can you imagine handling content across a range like that? Dealing with cultural differences, time zones, languages… Relying on a single team for content creation simply isn't an option.
Clarksons has thousands of employees, dozens of departments, and a lot of content. They’ve been using Foleon since 2018 to keep that content consistent. No matter who’s creating it, where they’re based, or what it's for.
We spoke to Sam Cottle, Marketing & Communications Director, and Nushin Stanton, Marketing Executive and Foleon power user at Clarksons.
According to them, Clarksons had 3 clear issues in the past:
- Lack of brand control across teams and regions
- Lack of visibility on performance and engagement
- Inability to scale as content needs evolved
They walked us through how they use workspaces, brand kits, and flexible permissions in Foleon to stay on top of it all.
So far, to date, Clarksons has:
“We continue to use Foleon on a day-to-day basis. If that were to go, we would be stepping back in time. It would really be a disaster.”
Sam Cottle, Marketing & Communications Director at Clarksons
“Initially, Foleon was mostly used within the marketing team, but since then, the demands from the business and the ambitions have really grown.”
Nushin Stanton, Marketing Executive at Clarksons
Keeping track of everything
The lack of control was a real problem.
“Different areas of the business were going off and doing their own thing. There was a whole world of stuff everywhere that lacked control and consistency.” — Sam
They relied on traditional communication methods, which weren't effective anymore.
“Internally, we lacked a space where we could collate information and comms that were going out… every time there was an update or news to share or action that needed taking it was just email, email, email… and as a result people were really switching off and not engaging.” — Sam
It simply wasn't possible to control every team's work, which often led to off-brand content being sent out. But when you grow to be a FTSE 250 company, content creation needs to align with the professionalism of the business.
“Different areas of the business were really going off and doing their own thing, creating satellite sites with different domains and there was just a kind of whole world of stuff everywhere that lacked control, that lacked consistency.” – Sam
Handling content on a wide scale
Clarksons is big. Really big.
“Clarksons is a FTSE 250 company. We've got 67 offices in 25 countries globally, over 2,000 employees.” — Sam
Being an FTSE 250 company means that Clarksons is publicly listed on the London Stock Exchange and ranks among the 250 largest companies in the UK. Which means, stakes are high, and they've got a lot of eyes on them.
They use Foleon across five workspaces, each mapped to a team or department.
“We have five workspaces in Foleon. Two are used within the marketing and comms teams. And the other three are used for our different departments and mainly their analyst teams.” — Nushin.
Setting up the platform this way, they can keep an eye on what other teams are doing.
“The Marketing and Comms team really acts as the admin across all of those different workspaces. That gives us visibility of what our different departments are doing… and making sure they're behaving themselves from a brand point of view.” — Sam
Structure with flexibility in the Brand Console
Foleon gave them the structure they lacked, but with flexibility. Now, brand governance is directly embedded into the process.
“We manage the brand kits within our Brand Console. So we can have control on a departmental level as well as a high level.” — Sam
They can also give teams a bit more flexibility when needed.
“90% of the time, we expect all of our teams to follow the brand guidelines. But subsidiaries have a slightly different look and feel. Having an individual brand kit for them is really helpful.” — Sam
Collaboration & control with the right user permissions
They set up Foleon so teams can work fast, even across time zones, avoiding bottlenecks.
“One of the workspaces has users in London, in Athens, in Singapore. It's important that all those users have the same permissions… someone in Singapore can log into Foleon and quickly make that data update and hit publish.” — Sam
They use pre-determined user permissions within the platform to make sure everyone can access what they need.
“We do a lot of training with our users to make sure that they're confident… so we can make them publishers.” — Nushin
Expanding content needs
They started small with only the marketing team using Foleon. Now they've expanded to several teams and departments.
“Initially, Foleon was mostly used within the marketing team. But since then, the demands from the business and the ambitions have really grown.” — Nushin
The team likes to experiment with Foleon, from reports, newsletters, landing pages… They create all sorts of content for all sorts of teams.
“Once we had our hands on it, it really started to grow… Now we've got five different workspaces, thousands of publications… all for different uses.” — Sam
The content they created in Foleon definitely made the marketing team more visible within the business. Soon, other departments came to them for help with their marketing needs. Giving the team more control over various initiatives.
“The stakeholders at Clarkson's definitely have more ambition now that they can see all the other stuff that we can spin up on Foleon and they come to us as the marketing team to see what else we can help them with.” — Nushin
The bottom line: Why does Clarksons keep using Foleon?
Foleon became part of the way they work. Taking it away would be a step back, as Sam explained.
“We continue to use Foleon on a day-to-day basis. It’s become a real integral part of how we operate… If that were to go, we would be stepping back in time.” — Sam
Ever since they started using the platform in the early days of Foleon, they have kept learning and growing with it. From one to five workspaces and from one to more than 3,000 Docs later, they intend to keep using it for a long time.
“Foleon has helped us stay ahead of what our competitors are doing… by reimagining content that would otherwise be quite static.” — Sam
Want to see how you can also get governance without slowing you down?
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