Maintaining company culture overseas

Expansion overseas brings several challenges to a brand.

While there is the opportunity to grow the business, it is unlikely that the brand will remain completely unchanged as new members of staff join and the brand message is tweaked to keep it inclusive of all markets.

Captify, the leading holder of search data in Europe, has recently added Hamburg to its current office locations in London and Kiev. The brand has a strong personal identity and is growing fast.

Dominic Joseph, co-founder and CEO of Captify, speaks about the corporate website as a tool for communicating company culture, “We wanted it to very much reflect what Captify is about. It’s about energy and it’s about being dynamic, fast-moving and very current. At the same time we wanted to have credibility behind it as well so it’s about trying to find that balance between innovation and information”. Digital platforms have the potential for global appeal and are key for communicating a brand’s unique qualities, particularly when the company’s offering is digitally focused as in Captify’s case.

Adam Ludwin, co-founder and CVO of Captify, says that, when setting up a new office overseas, the hiring process is crucial. As well as having senior management in place that fully understand company vision, he explains how Captify ensured that it maintained that level of dedication in every member of its team. “When we first started the business, we took on a lot of interns and we trained them up from scratch and we moulded them into what we felt was the perfect representative of Captify. So the aim in Germany was to recreate that, and it was really good for keeping the hunger and enthusiasm from day one.”

Ludwin continues, “We have a very strong culture at Captify, it always stems from the founders, and I think the founders really set the pace of what the company culture will be. We work very hard on that feel of being very hard working and really knowing our stuff, but at the same time having a lot of fun while doing it. Captify is a nice balance between work hard and play hard. We take our clients and our business seriously but at the same time we have a really great team ethic and we spend a lot of time outside the office. That culture we want to continue and take around the world and of course it’s hard to do that as you have more and more staff and countries but we’re up for that challenge and hopefully we can do it. It’s all down to hiring the right people.”

Captify helps businesses optimise ad placement online using extensive data analytics. Its clients include all big six agency groups; WPP, Aegis, Publicis, Omnicom, InterPublic and Havas. Its headquarters are situated in a disused banana warehouse in Covent Garden, London.