How do we tell a clear story across our businesses?

A clear group story explains the parent's purpose and connects its businesses through the value they collectively create, rather than simply describing common ownership. Clarify what the parent contributes, then show how the businesses' capabilities work together to serve customers.

Explain the group's role

Explain what the parent contributes to its family of businesses, rather than relying on a list of companies to communicate its purpose. For The Dot Group, the initial brand strategy brief was to clarify the company's function and purpose for the businesses within its wider family. The project subsequently expanded into a new name, identity, website and launch materials.

Consultation with investors and employees revealed a repeated need for greater clarity around purpose. Stakeholders also shared excitement about the future and pride in making a tangible difference to people's lives. The resulting name, Dot, expressed the group's role in connecting and capturing opportunities in global student living.

Use stakeholder conversations to identify both what people struggle to explain and what they already value about belonging to the group. Those findings can shape the group narrative before its expression through naming, identity and a website.

Sources: The Dot Group: joining the dots

Connect capabilities through customer value

Connect separate capabilities through the value customers gain from the wider offer. Teledyne Healthcare's businesses developed technologies including radiotherapy systems and X-ray imaging, but siloed communication meant customers often did not know the breadth of capabilities available.

The brand work identified a shared contribution: specialist expertise and resources that could fill gaps in customers' technical capabilities, supported by consultative partnerships rather than component supply alone. A patient journey narrative connected the technologies through their human impact. The tagline, "Technology for every step of the patient journey", anchored a flexible messaging system for exhibitions, posters, social media and promotional assets.

Map how each business contributes to a customer experience, then use that connection to organise the story. In 2025, The Ardonagh Group announced Everywhen for an advisory platform encompassing more than 45 trading names, saying the change would simplify the proposition and help colleagues present the full offer.

Sources: Teledyne Healthcare: Storytelling for Life-Changing Brands

How The Frameworks helps

Explaining your group of businesses

Your audiences need to understand how your businesses relate to one another and what the group represents. The Frameworks works with you across group companies to understand where individual accounts of the businesses leave gaps or create conflicting impressions. Stakeholder research, including employee and investor consultation, grounds the group story in how people understand the portfolio, rather than relying solely on the view from the parent organisation. This gives you a basis for agreeing a narrative that represents the group without obscuring its businesses.

The Frameworks delivers a group narrative and supporting messaging, a shared brand identity and portfolio websites that bring the businesses together in one understandable presentation. The language, design and digital experience give you consistent ways to explain the portfolio to customers, investors and employees. You gain a group story that people across your businesses can use, and audiences can understand without having to piece together separate company descriptions.

Let’s talk about telling your group's story 

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