Summer’s on its way. Holidays are booked (Turkey and North Devon, since you ask); city breaks to Paris and Liverpool have been enjoyed. Oooh-la-la, you scally. And in between the important stuff of life (holidays, holidays, holidays), we’ve been getting on with work too.

We were lucky enough to run a ‘masterclass’ (hah!) at the PR Week Summit at the end of April. This was a great chance for us to espouse at length on one of our favourite subjects – building advocacy to grow brand reputation from the inside out. We looked at companies doing this excellently in retail, financial services and technology. And we discussed ways in which you can build advocacy through storytelling. Henry was even able to keep a straight face while sharing his latest acronym: people are now the story. Pants. Seemed to go down well with our audience (the acronym, not his pants, thank goodness).

There were lots of inspiring sessions over the two days, led by PR and Internal Comms people from Coca Cola, Kingfisher, Philips, the FT, Starbucks and ITV, to name a few. And bizarrely, Dave Rowntree, the drummer in Blur, was on hand to advise on what to do if you get arrested, in his capacity as a solicitor with Kingsley Napley. Turns out modern life is not so rubbish after all. We’ve rounded the summit up via Storify on Day 1 and Day 2.

April also saw us advising on a cultural transformation programme for a law firm; developing a framework and identity for a company’s rewards package; putting together a white paper on gender intelligence for a logistics business; and brainstorming ideas to help a consultancy recruit and advance its female talent more efficiently. Lean in, we say.

As always, please get in touch if you’d like to know more. About pants, Blur, white papers or North Devon. We’re all ears.