Build corporate brands from inside out
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What would you like to grow today? How about a branding competence?
The big news late last week was the imminent global rebranding of PricewaterhouseCoopers to pwc. The press release announcing that “the most recognisable brand among the Big Four global professional services organisations” was about to refresh its brand tells you all you need to know about the strategic reason for the move. Despite billions in revenues and decades of heritage, the best thing the brand can claim right now is that it is the most recognised of the four big audit firms. Beyond this slightly elevated level of brand awareness, there is very little perceived differentiation between pwc and KPMG, Ernst & Young or Deloitte.
Achieving some genuine perceived differentiation for pwc would bestow some of the classic strategic advantages of a strong corporate brand.
First, as a professional services firm, you could increase your attractiveness to clients and eventually the fees you charge them. Internally, a stronger brand would drive employer brand strength, which is a major advantage when all you sell is people and those people are currently moving back and forth between the big four brands with gay abandon. And finally it would resolve the current embarrassment of being a consulting firm that apparently cannot run its own business properly. It’s hard to advise others on strategic differentiation when you’ve yet to achieve it yourself.
Any time a brand with billions in revenues and thousands of employees goes through a rebrand it is big news. But pwc is especially interesting because it has past form. In May 2002 the company spun off its consulting arm with the help of Wolff Olins and rebranded it “Monday”. Along with the name came a new position: “Sharpen your pencil, iron your crisp white shirts, set the alarm clock, relish the challenge, listen, be fulfilled, make an impact, take a risk.”
Aside from the ridiculous perkiness of the positioning and the impracticality of the name, the Monday rebranding was truly remarkable for the lack of brand engagement that was conducted as part of the process. Indeed, many of Monday’s staff only discovered the new name of their company when they arrived for work on the first Monday of Monday (if you see what I mean). As one employee told the BBC on launch day:
“We’ve had hysterics in our office all morning. This is out of the blue to us as well.”
Along with the infamous Consignia saga, it was the worst executed and shortest lived rebrand of the past decade. Four months and £75m later, Monday was sold to IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers shrugged off the incident and went back to business.
But now it is at it again and one would expect the firm to have learned from past experience. The initial signs, however, are not good. For starters, it has hired the same branding firm - Wolff Olins - that made such a balls-up of Monday in 2002. It’s an interesting choice that suggests that either Wolff Olins has improved greatly in the past eight years or pwc’s marketing team has turned over completely since 2002.
To achieve traction with a new corporate brand campaign, engage with the staff from the start
To work out which is the appropriate explanation, we need to know the degree to which pwc and Wolff Olins have engaged with employees during this current rebrand process. The initial signs are not good. In Australia - which pwc has selected as the first country for the global rollout of its new brand identity - managing partner of strategic marketing Mary Waldron claimed that the firm’s partners had been given a “sneak peak” of the new campaign this month and had been “overwhelmingly positive” about the new direction the firm is taking.
See Mark Ritson appear at The Annual, Marketing Week’s new conference on 29 September 2010 www.theannual.co.uk
The fact this was only a “sneak” peak, that it was done only in the last week or so and apparently reserved for just the partners of the firm suggests that pwc may be about to make the same mistake as 2002.
To achieve traction with a new corporate brand campaign, engage with the staff from the start. You build corporate brands from the inside out and the only proper way to do that is not to isolate the brand development within a small team of internal marketing specialists and external brand consultants.
One further concern with the new campaign is the strapline that pwc Australia is using for its launch. Along with the new logo, billboards and websites now challenge consumers to ask themselves “What would you like to grow?” Perhaps it’s my misspent youth, but the first few things that popped into my mind had nothing to do with revenues or profits. Then again, adopting the kind of slogan that you would usually associate with Viagra or hydroponics might be exactly what it takes for pwc to finally stand out from the generic big four firms.
Mark Ritson is an associate professor of marketing, an award-winning columnist and a consultant to some of the world’s biggest brands
Readers' comments (5)
Anonymous | Thu, 23 Sep 2010 2:01 pm
Agree with you completely on building the brand from the inside out. Agree with you completely on not isolating the brand within a small team - it should be understood and incorporated into all the activities across the business, and therefore feel a much more natural, credible and internally-owned (as opposed to externally-imposed) progressions.
But I think there's a difference between 'brand' (behaviours, values, standards, etc) and 'branding' - the latter being more focused on the visual aspects (or name, perhaps) which should follow on from the brand definition, and is probably less important in the grand scheme of things.
Rightly or wrongly, there are times and factors (confidentiality, impact, for example) that mean the branding part is kept relatively secret and revealed to the majority of people simultaneously.
What is wrong, I think, is when that revelation is a real shock and doesn't represent the brand that people recognise - or the ambitions they harbour. If the brand is a promise, it's only sensible to make sure the people who have to deliver it believe in it. In a service organisation such as PWC, that should be absolutely clear and respected.
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Brian J. Douglas | Thu, 23 Sep 2010 6:23 pm
A good article and similar to the previous comments I agree with the way the rebranding and communication exercise should have been carried out.
However given that the company has been referred to for some time now as pwc, and as a rebranding project goes, apart from playing with the identity - which I assume will not be great anyway - this is the equivalent of a British Petroleum to BP move (well executed by Landor). The latter did involve more identity changes, and a move away from the association as a "British" company. But alas when it came for Barrack Obama to attack them following the catastrophic Gulf rig accident and subsequent spillage he referred to them as "Briitsh Petroleum", and not the "beyond petroleum" that Lord Browne had worked so tirelessly to supplant in our minds! I do hope that the rebranding holds onto its new/revised identity long enough, without going back down the disastrous "Monday" route.
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Ian MacDonald | Sat, 25 Sep 2010 0:12 am
Excellent article. I think these PWC examples highlight the importance of Internal Communications as a discipline which is so often underestimated by marketers.
With the increasingly fragmented media landscape the effort involved in getting a truly integrated campaign or rebrand exercise away is so great that gaining widespread internal buy-in is so often left to the last minute.
Especially in the area of B2B and even more so, in professional services, the demonstration or embodiment of the brand positioning by personnel (the physical evidence of a positioning if you will) has the power to make or break the millions of advertising pounds poured into media.
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Anonymous | Tue, 28 Sep 2010 4:02 am
You are pissing off PWC by "Monday" story again, lol.
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Kevin Keohane | Fri, 8 Oct 2010 2:19 pm
I've posted a response at www.kevinkeohane.com about this (that's not intended as self promotion - here is the content) - http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/busy-week-in-media-coverage-of-the-people-agenda/
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PWC REBRAND
Marketing Week raises the issue of “building the brand from the inside out” in the context of PwC’s re-brand as if it is a startlingly new idea, and that PwC doesn’t seem to have learned from it’s MONDAY: experience – only offering employees a “sneak peak” at the new brand, rather than a more thorough and comprehensive employee brand engagement effort.
Scratch beneath the surface, though, and there is always more to these things than meets the eye. It’s interesting to note that MONDAY:, for all the flak it took, was arguably a stroke of genius. It would have been the first time one of the Big 5 (now big 4) had put something thicker than a cigarette paper between itself and its competitors. It stood out – and while any laughed, well … people also laughed at some other brands when they came out, too. “Orange is a Lemon” said the FT headline after that brand launch. Amazon, Penguin, Google. Silly names! All the brand and marketing literati laughed and scoffed and threw rocks (while actually making more noise for the new brands). When the laughter died out, brand equity was firmly established, thank you very much. If not for market conditions that made selling to IBM more profitable to the partners than an IPO, MONDAY: would be with us. And I suspect they’d be every bit as successful, too.
More concerning of course is the “sneak peak”. But trust me, these things are more challenging to manage than it might seem – more than “sneak peak” with 150,000 global employees is likely to spell L-E-A-K.
One can only hope that employees, partners, clients and key stakeholders were thoroughly engaged in the process that helped the brand agency arrive at the new positioning, promise and identity. The biggest bet will be – have they gone far enough? Given my experience with professional services firms, the final result will be a pale, watered down shade of what was a powerful idea at its core. Partnerships, let along those in professional services in accountancy, tax, finance and advisory, are notoriously difficult to rebrand for precisely this reason.
If PwC are smart, they’ll spend the next 3, 6, 12 months ensuring that every employee, from client-facing to back office support functions, has the opportunity to get their hands on the brand, talk about it, engage in action planning around what they’re going to do, or do differently, as a result of the rebrand. Will it lead to changes in the way talent is sourced, recruited, hired, on-boarded? Changes to performance planning, competency frameworks, reward and recognition? That’s when a re-brand actually becomes “inside out” instead of “lipstick on a gorilla.”
It will be interesting to see what changes – if anything.
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