Lessons from Accenture’s Re-Branding
From Accenture website
For example, this year everyone has been talking about company’s needing to have a purpose. There’s been reams of consumer and B2B data produced that demonstrates clearly that customers up and down the funnel want to know a company has a purpose…and that the only company that can be agile in a time of change is one with a purpose.
What a real purpose looks like
We’re talking a real purpose. One that actually means something tangible…not something you get here.
Here’s what Accenture has:
“…to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity.”
That’s pretty good, right? It’s specific and its energizing. Who, I ask, looks around in 2020 and thinks, “yeah, we’re making the most of technology and human ingenuity.”
Julie Sweet, the CEO of Accenture, is quoted saying something I think is relevant as well.
“I’m talking to a lot of CEOs right now who are saying we want to act with the speed we acted with in the crisis,” she says. “And I always ask a simple question: ‘What have you changed?’ And you have to institutionalize speed, and strategy is the same thing.”
Institutionalize Speed
I’ve seen this happen before in working a crisis communication situation. We manage some complex piece of communications effectively in a few hours with no warning, and the CEO immediately wonders why it took six weeks to get the last press release approved. And that’s a really good question.
(The answer, by the way, is everyone understood they had to act quickly and they did. For that crisis, you temporarily embraced speed. If you want it to happen all the time, you have to “institutionalize” it.)
Just to take it out of a communication bucket, you could say something similar about IT. “You made a DTC portal in five days but the last website reboot took 18 months.”
So, here’s another page in our agility playbook: “institutionalize speed and strategy.”
It’s harder than it sounds.
If it’s important, act like it
One more thing I liked about this approach. This is important to Accenture…and they are acting like it. So many times I have had a client tell me something or other is the most important thing they are doing, and yet they don’t act like it is. They don’t invest enough time or money to make it effective, and you’re lucky if it limps along.
Success takes investment. Accenture tripled their media buy for the year to make sure their brand changes hit home with its stakeholders. Again, the strategy is often to underplay this and then wonder why there’s brand confusion.
The pandemic changed everything and they’re betting that it will continue. As David Droga, the founder of their Ad Agency says:
“We wanted to sort of make people realize that change comes in all shapes and sizes, from the seismic to the incremental.”
Change is coming. The good news is that it will create winners and losers…and we can show you how to make it work for you.