Classification underpins the safety of almost every ship at sea and is largely invisible for exactly that reason. When class works, nothing happens – which makes its value difficult to articulate to the regulators, owners, shipbuilders and insurers whose decisions depend on it.
The International Association of Classification Societies faced a second difficulty. As the body representing the world’s leading class societies, IACS speaks for members whose individual brands are considerably larger than its own. It needed recognition and a distinct voice among senior maritime stakeholders without competing with the organisations it exists to represent. BLUE was appointed in March 2024 to raise IACS’s brand awareness and communicate both its value proposition and the importance of class itself.
BLUE built the programme on the principle that an association earns attention through authority rather than volume. Rather than chase reach, we targeted the specific seniority and sectors that mattered to IACS and let the quality of the content do the work.
The remit began as a digital-only brief and grew into an integrated offer: social media strategy, owned content development and adaptation, paid LinkedIn campaigns, press office and media relations from December 2024, SEO, AI-search visibility, and regional communications in China through a dedicated WeChat channel.
That breadth was deliberate. Senior maritime stakeholders now form their view of an organisation across trade press, search results, LinkedIn feeds and, increasingly, AI-generated answers – so IACS needed to be present and consistent in all of them.
LinkedIn following has grown by over 200%, and its composition matters more than its size: 69% of followers are now senior level or above, with organic engagement rising from 8% to 11% even as platform distribution tightened. IACS now generates more engagement per post than pages publishing three to four times the volume.
The press office has secured 276 pieces of coverage. In search, ranking keywords in the UK are up 40% and IACS holds #1 for “role of class in shipping”. And in the channel that increasingly shapes first impressions, 62% of tracked AI-generated answers now cite IACS.
