PETER ROBINSON
COMMUNICATIONS
A captivating story
Peter Robinson is a leading international writer and storyteller for business. For over 30 years, he has helped major corporations, financial institutions and government bodies create narratives that engage, persuade and resonate.
Alongside a passion for business and its role in society, Peter has a personal mission to humanise today’s technology-rich corporate environments. As a former poet, journalist and adman, he also prizes great writing and keeps his own corporate work fresh and fizzing by writing travel journalism and fiction.
"
Peter has advised me for almost 20 years across transformation programmes in public sector and private business. No matter how complex the situation and no matter how varied the stakeholder group, Peter retains his strong focus and grip on his customer’s central objectives, delivering compelling, nuanced messages using brilliant, simple language."
Robert Osborne
Amey, Partnerships for Schools, Augmentis
Engage
Persuade
Resonate
Consulting and writing
Sparks often fly at the interface of narrative and strategy – crafting the best story can drive new directions and even business change. Peter has advised on messages, markets and media at the highest levels, and has led creative teams delivering major communications programmes around the world.
Key project
The French Internet business Netatmo faced fierce European competition from Google’s Nest and BT’s Hive in the B2B market for Smart Thermostats. Peter developed a full B2B proposition and implemented it via a range of collateral that included a ‘Playbook’ of business tactics for major energy suppliers to add the Thermostat to their offering.
To open boardroom doors Peter reimagined the cost-benefit analysis from individual customers generating tiny sums of money to hundreds of thousands of users adding tens of millions of euros to the bottom line.
Engagement and change
Peter’s experience in the IT industry fuelled a personal mission to humanise technology-rich business environments. From communicating change brought by new computers and processes it was a natural step for his work to evolve into employee engagement. He’s now an international leader in crafting narratives that engage, persuade and resonate, driving behavioural change through campaigns for ideas inside big organisations.
Key project
Peter worked with Mars over a period of a decade, supporting a long-term engagement programme with copywriting, creative leadership and board-level guidance. Among his work was a rewrite of the company’s guiding principles, and a project to collect case studies and stories about how the principles in action engaged the 70,000-strong workforce.
Ultimately he ghost-wrote a book on the company’s journey, which had seen its engagement rise to be among the highest in the world.
Winning bids
Writing successful bids for major infrastructure projects needs a broad range of skills – strong analytical thinking to get underneath the questions, a head for figures and technical detail and the ability to write clear, polished and accessible prose. It also needs the writer to be as enthusiastic about the project itself as the people who are designing it. Peter’s bid writing ticks all those boxes.
Key project
Peter has worked on many successful bids since 2000. He led the creative team that helped deliver the successful bid for the new Barts and the London Hospitals, as well as helping develop several bids under the Blair government’s Building Schools for the Future programme.
He worked on the early stages of the Mersey Gateway and M25 widening schemes, and has written numerous bids and framework submissions in a broad range of sectors throughout the UK and in North America.
"
I have worked with Peter for over 14 years and within companies across diverse sectors, from financial services to recruitment and hospitality. Peter’s work on Whitbread’s efficiency campaign made a significant difference to the attitude of the organisation; changing the way teams behave and embedding a culture of efficiency. Peter is unique since he can help organisations think clearly about outcomes and drive confident campaigns to deliver real benefits. His creativity, clear thinking and ability to ask the right questions deliver real value"
Pauline Broadway
BMW, Royal Mail, Whitbread
About Peter
Peter combines the ability to produce memorable and entertaining writing with a genuine understanding of business and a life-long love of science and technology.
Having had to choose as a teenager between being a poet or a physicist, he studied English at Cambridge and won both a university poetry prize and a travelling scholarship that took him to Harvard to study with Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney. But amid the burgeoning computer revolution, his interest in science and technology persisted, and after stints in advertising (NCK) and journalism (Daily Mirror and Illustrated London News) he took a PR job with an IT startup that was developing financial software for the boards of major corporations.
As a crash course in business, it completely changed his direction, taking him to New York to help build the company’s US profile. Energised by Manhattan he returned to the UK in 1989 to start his own first business – PRPR Ltd – offering PR and marketing services to IT companies. He ran the company successfully throughout the 1990s, writing pioneering websites from 1994.
In 1996, he met Giles Giggins, with whom he founded and ran Beyond Design Solutions, offering multi-media communications programmes to some of the world’s largest companies. He founded Peter Robinson Communications in 2013 and continues to work successfully with major international clients.
Peter is a Fellow of the RSA, an alumnus of Templeton College, Oxford’s Strategic Leadership Programme and was Acting Communications Director for the start-up and launch of Partnership for Schools, which delivered the Blair government’s £45bn Building Schools for the Future programme.
A published poet in his teens, Peter spent a year between school and university making lipstick in a factory in the north of France. He’s written for the think tank, Demos, and was a regular contributor to the travel section of the Telegraph newspaper between 1999 and 2014. His first novel will be published later this year and he is working on his second.
He was a member of the band, Police Dog Hogan (regularly featured in Tim Dowling’s Guardian column) between 2008 and 2014 but gave it up to move to Folkestone, Kent, where he is connecting a Victorian house to the Internet of Things and ‘sciencing the shit’ out of his organic vegetable garden.
Peter's news
Made to Measure Mentoring
Alongside his long-established communications and creative practice, Peter is Chairman of the fast-growing training and education services company, Made to Measure Mentoring Limited (M2M2®).
Having advised the company’s founders on its initial formation, he helped produce their winning bid for the 3-year, £4.6m British Army Trainer Contract (ATC), which has now been extended for two more years, in partnership with CDS Defence Support. He is currently guiding the company’s rapid expansion, driven by the Army contract and a major professional development programme M2M2 is delivering to NATO.
Animated films for St. James's Place
Peter recently completed a series of animated films for St. James’s Place, the UK’s leading wealth management company.
He conceived, wrote and directed the films for a Board sub-committee, working with a range of graphic designers, animators and creative team members. The films cover numerous aspects of the company’s operations, including this, which explores the implications for pensions of 100-year lifetimes.
"
Peter has helped the Mars Knowledge Management Team time and again make knowledge useable for our associates. He has the ability to understand complex business strategies and turn them into easily understood, visually stimulating materials. He has been instrumental in enabling us to share success stories geographically, taking the words of the original storyteller, and producing digestible write-ups that are very readable without losing the original voice. I would wholeheartedly recommend him."
Kirsty Areki
Mars