Give Accenture credit where credit’s due. They’ve done a damn fine job of building their brand. ‘High Performance. Delivered’ was never going to set the world on fire but it’s certainly one of the few B2B brand slogans that seems to linger a little longer in the memory.
Okay, cynics among you may well argue that if you throw a multi-million dollar budget behind your brand, it’s inevitable something is going to stick. But what can us lesser mortals, who haven’t got the luxury of Tiger Woods at our disposal, learn from Accenture?
Well if there’s one thing, I’d say it’s to establish a clear brand position and most importantly, stick with it. Three years down the line and Accenture are doing just this.
Not an earth shattering conclusion, but it’s a fundamental that so many companies operating across the technology industry and beyond seem to get wrong – chopping and changing their position on an almost annual basis.
Yes, it keeps us agency types in business – but how confusing is it for customers or prospects? What’s more, how do you expect to get the best return on your marketing spend, when you’ve spent hard cash on researching, developing and launching your brand proposition only to throw it all away a year or so down the line – just to go through the same exercise again?
So who’s to blame? Is it the agencies pushing to take on a lucrative new brand repositioning campaign? The incoming marketing director wanting to make their mark? The long-serving marketers bored with the existing position? Or the sales director arguing the current brand position isn’t helping them sell more?
And in each instance, there’s often one pretty major party that gets overlooked – the customer. Put yourself in their shoes. You tell them you stand for one thing – and then a year later another… and who knows what the following year. Identity crisis.
It’s easy to argue that businesses are changing so fast these days they need to carry on changing their positioning to stay relevant. True to a point – however, it’s about evolution not revolution. Establish the right brand platform and it can be re-interpreted in different ways as your organisation evolves. You only need to look to the consumer space to know it’s true. In 1988, a fairly mediocre sportswear company came up with the brand position ‘Just do it’. Funny thing is, it’s still working for them today.
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