30 Years of KSBR? Surely not…
…..But yes it’s true, KSBR hit 30 years old in 2024. So ignoring the generally-accepted fact that year-end roundups at the festive end of the calendar are probably a self-indulgent mistake, here’s three decades worth of them, summarised like all good reports in a hopefully-manageable number of headlines:
2020-2023
An occasionally-too-exciting exercise in reinvention as Covid grabbed hold, shook us hard and dropped us in a very different place from where we’d started. We learned what could be virtualised and what needed to stay ‘physical’ and we learned that insight matters at least as much when everything’s in turmoil as it does when business is ‘as-usual’. We’re also proud to think that we’ve helped our clients to help their customers to navigate their ways through the ‘cost-of-living’ challenges that every sector has been, and mainly still is, subject to.
2016-2019
Stretching further afield: Europe had been a nice, easily-defined territory for us up to 2016 but that stopped being the case and we had to re-focus. We concentrated on offer and message strategy research, and focussed on new partnerships too in further-afield territories; we haven’t looked back.
2008-2015
No time to relax as recession and (the explicit era of) austerity brought massive challenges across Europe and a lot of tough decisions for businesses and their customers. For us this was the moment when our obsession with listening was born: research that stepped back a bit, got smarter about engagement with respondents, thought harder, analysed more and delivered what we still call ‘customer-driven strategies’.
2001-2007
Was an era of rapid growth, the agency had become firmly embedded in the telecoms universe just in time for Broadband to kick off and a big chunk of the rest of our work was in the booming financial sector. With big clients in other service sectors and as a COI agency we grew fast and delivered a lot of internal, facilitation and workshop projects as well as research – as of course we still do today.
2000
A brief spate of Madness. We literally ran projects to help global companies navigate their customers’ terror about the world stopping. What would happen when operating systems collapsed at the millennial midnight!
1994 to 1999
A giddying time for KSBR’s founders as they discovered that life really did exist outside West End advertising. With wise advice from our erstwhile agency bosses, who helped us kickstart the company and made sure we were never short of the right sort of introductions, we set down the basic principles for KSBR from the outset:
- Always respect the consumer
- Listen before you speak
- Don’t just tell – show. Bring it to life
- Engage everyone and build teams: a great idea doesn’t care who has it
