About This Case Study
This is a retrospective strategic analysis of a real communications challenge, not actual Comms Threader output. It illustrates how strategic scaffolding structures thinking from problem to narrative.
Real Threader outputs depend on your context, uploads, and decisions. See actual tool usage in the Boeing case study or explore best practices.
Thames Water
Regulated Monopoly in Crisis
The Golden Thread
Problem: This is not a reputation problem. It is a permission-to-exist problem. Thames Water is a regulated monopoly that has extracted billions in dividends while discharging sewage into rivers, and its customers cannot switch to a competitor.
Tension: 16 million captive customers cannot leave, but they can demand renationalisation. The company must earn the right to continue as a private entity by demonstrating that private ownership can deliver public good.
Message: For a public that is captive, angry, and politically empowered to demand renationalisation, Thames Water must prove that private investment can fix what private extraction broke.
Platform: Stop defending the private model and start demonstrating, with visible local evidence, that investment is reaching the infrastructure customers can see and smell.
Story
The Brief: Thames Water, the UK’s largest water company, faces a convergence of crises: over 7,800 sewage discharges into rivers, £18.3 billion in debt from leveraged buyout-era extraction, potential renationalisation, four CEOs in five years, and record-low public trust. Customers cannot switch provider but can, and do, demand political intervention.
Challenge Reframe: This is not a reputation problem. It is a permission-to-exist problem. Thames Water is a regulated monopoly that has extracted billions in dividends while discharging sewage into rivers, and its customers cannot switch to a competitor.
Sector Convention: Water companies respond to sewage scandals by publishing investment plans, highlighting infrastructure spending, and framing themselves as responsible stewards of essential services.
Audience
Priority Stakeholder: Local Communities Along Affected Waterways
Stakeholder Tension: They experience the failure directly, through sewage in the rivers they swim in, walk beside, and care about. They are organised, media-savvy, and increasingly connected to national campaign groups.
Message
Message Hierarchy: For communities who can see and smell the failure of decades of underinvestment, Thames Water is the utility that makes infrastructure improvement visible, local, and verifiable, because trust rebuilds from the riverbank up, not from the boardroom down.
What We Won't Say: We are investing in infrastructure. We take our environmental responsibilities seriously. We are committed to protecting waterways.
Plan
Comms Direction: Replace corporate communications with hyper-local, verifiable evidence of infrastructure investment in specific communities, letting residents confirm improvement rather than relying on corporate claims.
Frame: Narrative Territories
The River Report
Publish real-time water quality data for every affected waterway. Let communities monitor their own river. Turn monitoring into proof.
Feel: Local, transparent, community-owned
The Visible Fix
Make infrastructure investment physically visible. Construction sites, progress updates, before-and-after evidence. Let people see where the money goes.
Feel: Tangible, evidential, ground-level
The People’s Utility
Reframe employees as local residents doing essential work. Bridge the gap between the hated brand and the valued service.
Feel: Human, local, service-focused
What Actually Happened
Thames Water’s communications have struggled to gain traction against a relentless news cycle of sewage incidents, financial instability, and leadership departures. The company published investment plans and environmental commitments that were largely dismissed by media, regulators, and campaign groups. Ofwat placed the company under enhanced monitoring. Renationalisation remained a live political option. The gap between corporate messaging and public experience remained the defining characteristic of the communications challenge.
Why It Failed
- Corporate investment narratives were contradicted by visible evidence of continuing sewage discharges, creating a credibility gap that no messaging could bridge
- The £18.3 billion debt and dividend history made any spending claim feel like accounting rather than genuine investment
- Leadership instability (four CEOs in five years) prevented any consistent voice or narrative from establishing itself
- Campaign groups and local communities owned the narrative through direct evidence and emotional storytelling that corporate comms could not match
- The case demonstrates that regulated monopolies face a unique communications challenge: customers cannot leave, but their anger is a political force that can restructure the industry