Lats Kladny

Lats, CEO and co-founder of Inox Communication, discusses the company's assertive positioning in a world where becoming responsible is now a primary necessity, for individuals and companies alike.

“How do you define the role of an agency in 2021? At Inox, we were thinking about this before the pandemic, when we left the aquarium of creative agencies to become an agency that aims, above all, to be useful to progress, and that addresses issues linked to transformation for brands.

Our first love has always been the creation and development of brands. Today, we're focusing on helping them reformulate themselves in response to the challenges they face. The implementation of this approach accelerated sharply with the health crisis, during which a large number of business models were once again challenged.

The approaches we propose to our customers are first and foremost self-imposed, particularly when it comes to sustainable development, digitalization and multidisciplinarity. It's from these exchanges that we can develop a real ability to make proposals to help a company's values evolve. We now begin all our mandates with a contextual workshop, aimed at understanding and sustaining the brand by considering the challenges it faces in the future. This goes beyond communication per se, but in the end, it's all about communication, isn't it?

« The challenges are so complex that we're going to have to be creative to come up with tomorrow's solutions. And for me, it's clear that the best breeding ground for creativity is diversity. »

The notion of exchanging and passing on knowledge is paramount for the agency, including with customers. In Switzerland, secrecy has traditionally been cultivated, and the reflex to spontaneously share knowledge is rarely spontaneous. But today, to create value, this exchange is often essential. Throughout all the initiatives we have launched, we have based ourselves on this logic: invite our customers, raise their awareness and train them, even as we are in the process of acquiring the knowledge to do so. Because the more we share the same knowledge, the faster business can potentially accelerate. In this process, we learn from our customers, and they, in turn, learn from us.

Today, there's a lot of talk about “Design Thinking” to encourage the development of new ideas. In Europe in particular, innovation is vital because it creates margin. This is true, but unfortunately it is very often and very exclusively connoted with “technology”, whereas innovation should reveal itself everywhere; this need for creativity implies, by definition, multidisciplinary approaches. But I'm astonished to note that in business - where innovation is one of the main vehicles for survival - there are very few creative people on management boards. That's why Raphael Pizzera (co-founder of Inox Communication) and I have been campaigning for a long time to bring more creativity to the decision-making table. For this to work, people need to share common values, including respect and recognition of talent. Today, it's lawyers and financiers who sit at the top of companies, which is all very well, but often insufficient. To make progress, we need creativity boosted by gender diversity, which is the best breeding ground for solutions to the challenges of today and tomorrow!