A communications/PR/marketing agency which shows pricing? Crazy? Probably.

We named ourselves Honest London to drive what we’re passionate about. Being honest and transparent with our clients.

We knew the risks of naming ourselves something like this, I used to be in charge of all marketing/PR/Comms for Soho Gyms (may it rest in peace) which bravely had the slogan “So Fit, So Friendly, Soho Gyms”.

If a customer had a bad experience at the gym, you can guarantee this slogan was used as their argument. “Friendly… pft… I don’t think so.” You can imagine the fun I had with Soho Gym’s online reviews.

Though the risk was high for them, it was mentioned in every staff meeting that Soho Gyms had to stand out from the competition for their friendliness and it truly did, I did a lot of tours of other gyms to see where we can improve and our openness and kindness was second to none. Soho Gyms was like an extra friendly family based in London for many of its members, it was very LGBTQ+ friendly and welcomed anyone with open arms. I truly loved this place and what it did for its members for the 24 years it was open.

Now back to Honest London, with myself and fellow Co-Founder Ajay having terrible experiences working in-house for agencies and being client side, we decided to create our own pushing our personal values and never providing the horrible experiences we unfortunately suffered.

We made a list of negative client side experiences we had separately using agencies and the common trend between us was:

• False promises to win deals

• Dishonesty

• Fake results

• Patronising

With myself and Ajay having very different experiences/career paths - me working primarily with ‘well known people’ and a mix of brands like Soho Gyms to serious B2B brands and Ajay heading up comms, strategy and PR at the likes of Canary Wharf, it was crazy how similar our experiences with agencies were showing a bad trend.

So, we confidently named our Agency Honest London knowing we’d stick to our values always which treat our clients like we would our friends and family. The formalities, for the most part, are out of the window, we are happy to text, jump on a call and be completely transparent with our clients when it comes to ideas, execution and results.

Why we show our strategy, PR, marketing pricing... all our services pricing?

While we were creating our lists of negative experiences from a client side of an agency, we went ahead and produced one from our agency side experiences (both myself and Ajay have agency experience before Honest).

A similar trend once again happened:

• Hierarchy of clients

• Made up prices dependent on brand/person

For myself, I worked in an agency who would have a board of clients listed in importance which is just ludicrous to me. It was ranked dependent on their net-worth, name and how much they paid the agency. This would regularly leave the smaller brands disappointed in the service where the work was continuously delayed and meetings cancelled, it was embarrassing to work there.

It was incredibly normal for the agencies myself and Ajay worked at to produce a beautiful proposal personalised to the brand with a stunning personalised price at the end, this price wasn’t curated by the work load or how many hours but instead by a Google of “*Brand Name* net worth”… “*CEO Name* net worth”.

This is why we’ve made Honest London different, you won’t get a pretty proposal from us (these things take hours to make and we’d rather our team put the time into our paying clients). We truly believe in having a nice casual conversation with our potential clients and learning their needs is far more effective.

We have set prices for our packages, why? This removes any risk of us putting one brand or celebrity before another. Every client is equal to us and deserves the same time and commitment, we feel honoured when someone wants to work with us out of the many thousands of agencies, the least we can do is work our hardest for them.

We list on our site what you get for your money, our potential clients know the cost and don’t have to waste their time reaching out, waiting on a proposal to then find out we’re potentially too costly for them. With our Strategy and Directions package, included is social media (organic and paid), PPC and SEO. This saves our clients having to go and work with a tonne of different agencies, it also lets us do our work better as we can truly produce a 360 strategy which benefits our brands hugely.

We offer services to suit brands/celebrities of all sizes, we have our full blown brand PR and Strategy services and our celebrity reputation management service. We also offer brand and celebrity texting services for those with smaller budgets or less need for actual execution but more advice and tips.

Written by Co-Founder, Lauren.

It’s been a terrible year for most so we are currently offering 20% off all our services in 2020, if you choose a 6 or 12 month contract, these prices will continue.