I’d like to tell you a story about Lilac Howell.
In 2009, I set out to help businesses with their marketing and communications. At the same time, my creative partner, Steve Cranston, set out to make great films.
Over the next few years, we worked successfully on a few film projects together and it was Steve who suggested we might want to make this arrangement a bit more formal.
So, we created a brand – Lilac Howell Films – to combine the best of what I did and the best of what Steve did. We’d become a strategic film company.
Since 2014, we’ve been phenomenally successful with this approach. Offering our clients a fresh perspective on their communications and helping them to integrate film into their plans effectively.
In 2021, we became simply ‘Lilac Howell’ as a result of this strategic approach. Our clients increasingly saw as an extension of their marketing departments and sought our advice on strategy, planning and implementation, as well as content creation. They kind of led us in that direction.
We realised we’d now gone beyond just film and become those strategic content creators we’d set out to be back in 2014.
Why am I telling you this story?
Well, we’ve never really blown our own trumpet over the years. We’ve just got on with making great films and ensuring our clients maximise their visibility and impact with the chosen target audience.
Then we had a call from one of our long-standing clients to say they’d won a prestigious award, in part, as a result of the film content we’d created for them.
This was quickly followed by another, who’d secured a multi-million-pound contract on the strength of us creating a film that depicted their value proposition in a highly visual way.
Then another let it be known that our suggestion of putting film at the heart of their internal communications strategy had resulted in their best ever
participation rate on the employee survey and their highest satisfaction score with internal communication!
This got us thinking about what we’d achieved over the last 13 years and where we are now, and what we want to be in the future.
We’ve worked with the UK and other national Governments on high-profile projects; with local authorities on prestigious developments and a host of SME’s on subjects and topics too numerous to mention. We’ve helped them win awards, secure contracts, improve their brand awareness, upskill their employees and increase their bottom line. We’ve certainly come a long way since 2009.
Today, we work with the likes of Network Rail, Mitie, ATS Euromaster and ERA Security; along with local authorities, housing associations, the NHS, and lots and lots of SME’s across the country.
However, it’s in the last 12 months that our business has really taken off. We’ve grown from a team of two to seven in just over 12 months, created a well-equipped broadcast-quality studio at our head office in Stafford, reached almost ½ million turnover and took on new, high-profile clients, attracted to our strategic communications know-how, as well as our content creation talents.
Our most recent win is for a documentary-style film depicting the beauty of the Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere, who are keen to raise awareness of this precious resource amongst the public, with a short film tracking this environment through the seasons. We won this on the strength of our all-round marketing and communications nous as much as our lauded toolbox of films.
In many ways, Lilac Howell is a very different animal to what it was in 2014 and in some, no different at all. Those combined talents of Steve and I always worked beautifully together and allowed us to be so much more than a mere film production company.
We could start a conversation with a blank piece of paper and the simple question of ‘what are you trying to achieve’? Our clients got it immediately and tapped into our expertise and experience from the off. It’s what led us to where we are today.
So, what’s next?
Well, we know what we’re good at and we intend to carry on in that vein. That doesn’t mean we can’t think on our feet for our clients in other aspects of marketing communications, but this is something we can do with trusted partners. Its why we go networking.
No, we will carry on being dynamic strategic partners to our clients when it comes to imaginative content creation and the ability to maximise their budgets to get the biggest bang for the marketing pound.
Well, perhaps we could be a little more open to blowing our own trumpet more often than we have done! But only when we have something worth shouting about!
For more information on how Lilac Howell can help your business harness the persuasive power of film in your marketing communications, visit www.lilachowell.com, or call 01785 532203.
