CorpComms Magazine

Dealing with the communications challenges of one of Britain's largest utilities involves rather different demands from those at a global business-to-business publishing house.

 Catherine May should know, because that's the career switch she chose to make a year ago. Many things undoubtedly happen at Reed Elsevier but the company probably doesn't send gas bills to people's pets or to householders who died years ago. Of course, Centrica - better known under its British Gas trading name - doesn't either, stresses May. At least not very often. 'There will be some,' admits 42-year-old May. 'With 19 mn customers, it would be very difficult never to get anything wrong.'

However distressing for customers and damaging for the company those occurrences may be, there's another major difference between May's most recent roles that is more fundamental. At Reed, she says the notion that the company was making too much money rarely occupied the corporate communications team - but it's a highly sensitive issue at Centrica.

More than a decade ago, the issue of fat cat pay angered the company's retail shareholders so much that protesters brought Cedric, an inflatable pig named after the company's then chief executive, Cedric Brown, into a lively shareholders' meeting. A real-life pig weighing 30 stone, also called Cedric, stayed outside as a demonstration against Brown's 74 percent pay rise to £475,000.

Centrica is now a very different company, May argues, but a lot of work still goes into managing perceptions about its profits and balancing the service sector ethos with the need to deliver good returns to investors. 'It's never straightforward because the stakeholders are very rarely aligned,' she says. 'We've just posted record interim profits. What's wrong with that? But it's very sensitive in an industry as price-led as this one is in its dealings with customers.

You have to think about how customers will react. Have we done a good enough job in telling people we have moved twice to cut prices this year and that we have moved further than any other gas supplier?

'Do people understand that we are spending a huge amount of money bringing in gas supplies from overseas because the UK does not have enough for its own needs? There are a lot of coalfired power stations in the UK coming to the end of their lives and Britain is going to be importing 50 percent to 60 percent of its gas from overseas in as little as two years, compared with about 35 percent now. Do our stakeholders understand all the effort we are putting into negotiating replacement sources?'

The team's the thing

Communicating all this, plus Centrica's efforts to look after what it calls the 'fuel-poor' section of British society and its efforts to be on the right side of the climate change debate, is the job of a 30-strong team covering corporate and internal communications, corporate responsibility and regional affairs.

May says the group puts a lot of effort into finding out what people think of it, carrying out direct research with its customers, undertaking opinion audits among MPs, and polling journalists and analysts covering the sector. She also believes Centrica has a role in educating people about energy use, where it has a much lower carbon footprint than its coal-based rivals.

The company has two green tariffs, which charge higher rates for the supply of greener electricity, and is in a joint venture planning a £1 bn 'clean' coal power station on Teesside. May says Centrica also takes its social responsibilities seriously and has signed up 378,000 customers to its Essentials tariff, which offers cheaper power to the low-paid. 'We have given these customers savings of £19.6 mn on their energy bills,' she says.

The right stuff

The issue is communicating all this to customers who continue to talk about the Gas Board or believe British Gas is still government-owned - but May has more than her five-year experience at Reed Elsevier to fall back on. Like many in the profession, she entered PR by accident after looking for roles in advertising and journalism and going through the selection process at advertising group DMB&B.

'They said, We think you're great but we also think you are looking for the wrong job. Do you know anything about PR?' she recalls. 'I said that I didn't really and they explained what it was. One of them said, This is really odd but we think you would make a really good PR person.'

DMB&B recommended her to its PR subsidiary, Manning Selvage & Lee, but it had no vacancies at the time, so May ended up in public relations at the Heating and Ventilating Contractors' Association. 'It was a real baptism of fire,' she remembers. 'It sounds as dull as dishwater but it was a really interesting organisation.'

She then worked at Penn Communications for clients including the British Dental Association and BT before switching to Edelman and then landing 'a fantastic job' as director of communications for the international arm of US West, one of the Baby Bell local phone companies.

'It involved going all over the world, anywhere there were new licences for cellular or wireless telecoms,' she says. 'The scariest one was Moscow. There was a 10 pm curfew after which we couldn't go outside. We went out to dinner with the advertising agency and went to a casino that also ran a hotel so people could get around the curfew. When you got up in the morning it was painfully evident what the bedrooms were usually used for.'

After that, May went back into the world of agencies, becoming a founder partner at crisis management specialists Luther Pendragon. When she joined Reed Elsevier at the age of 36, she was one of the youngest ever corporate communications directors at a FTSE 100 company.

Now May is in the energy sector for the first time, and she's grateful she wasn't there a decade ago. 'I'm thankful the pig was before my time,' she concedes.

'I would like to think I would not have seen executives alongside me getting unreasonably rewarded. It's easier to do a good job here because I get a voice at the table and I don't have to fight to be taken seriously. I would not enjoy working for a company that was poor in that regard.'

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