The entrepreneur famed for appearing on televisions around the world telling us that he liked the shaver so much he bought the company, also had another saying that is etched in the foundations of Lighthouse.
Victor Kiam, Mr Remington himself, once said: “In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running; if you stand still, they will swallow you.”
This is part of the thought process we’ve had at Lighthouse since it was established 15 years ago, and today it’s one of the central elements to the approach we take for our client partners.
It has driven many changes in the business since our foundation, helping us – and more importantly our clients – achieve great results even at the most challenging times, including the one we face now.
The commitment to keep moving and not stop, no matter what challenges stand in our way, has seen Lighthouse evolve from a traditional public relations agency to a business partner committed to guiding and transforming reputations in order to power commercial results.
When we started the business, we were recognised for our strategic approach to solving business challenges through communications and creative concepts, supported by powerful storytelling. This approach worked, and one of our clients from back then, oOh!media, is to this day a company we are still proud to be partnering with.
At that time, traditional media was the main platform for brands to tell their story to many. Our clients benefited from an in-depth understanding of news media, plus a strong track record in successfully navigating it to gain results.
However, we were also well aware that we needed to adapt our business to the emerging digital revolution.
Back then there were only around 64 million websites, accessible to just over 50 per cent of Australians who had internet access at home. This is miniscule when considering that today there are almost 1.8 billion websites and approximately 90 per cent of the Australian population is connected.
The websites available at that time were one-dimensional brochures discovered by search engines including AltaVista, Yahoo and an upstart called Google that had entered the Australian market two years earlier. It was a time when social media was made up of niche platforms, with MySpace as the best known hitting a milestone of one million active monthly users globally.
Two years later Facebook would surpass and pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of the first social networking site to reach a global audience. Within seven years, Facebook would then surpass the massive milestone of more than one billion active monthly users.
As this revolution heated up and Facebook along with some others become more dominant, Lighthouse started to test and learn to help clients engage with audiences through these new digital platforms. Our offering continued to evolve to include more sophisticated digital capabilities including strategy development, digital marketing, content creation and social media management.
While creating great content was one piece of the puzzle, we also recognised the benefits of an integrated owned, earned and paid media strategy across traditional and digital platforms to drive discovery, create connections and generate new leads.
But our evolution didn’t stop there. We kept finessing our offering to extend the role we play in our client partners’ successes, introducing new skills including digital media planning and buying, content marketing, measurement and analytics, as well as brand development and design.
Combined with our traditional offerings, these new elements make up Lighthouse 360, which enables us to partner with an organisation at every step of its communications cycle and run completely integrated communications campaigns seamlessly and efficiently.
Today we still bring clarity to communications challenges and help navigate the complex and cluttered communications landscape, but with a wider offering and a deeper understanding of the strategies and campaigns required to deliver commercial advantage for global and local brands and organisations.
The 15-year Lighthouse journey has not seen us stand still for long (if at all), and this has benefitted our clients as we enter the next stage of our evolution with a fresh new look, renewed brand promise, and refined approach to keeping our clients in front of the pack. As Mr Remington would say, it’s better for them to be nibbled than become their competitors’ breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Peter Laidlaw