Marketing Capsules - Accenture
How Accenture's "I'm your idea" marketing campaign heightened its brand image among executives?
Background Anderson Consulting, a consulting arm of Aurthor Anderson (an accounting company),was forced to change its market identity after splitting from its parent company in year 2000 which lead to its new name "Accenture". Year 2002 and 2003 experienced a thrust in marketing effort by consulting companies. Year 2002 marked its foundation with IBM's acquisition of Pricewaterhouse Cooper's consulting arm, later called IBM Global Services, which doubled its consulting size and dramatically extended its range of business expertise. EDS, following a bad year and loss of business in 2003, embarked upon marketing campaign to repair its brand image. For consulting business is largely dependent upon the health of other corporations, the first few years experienced slower growth and hence for growth, Accenture and its competitors had to steal each-others market share for sustained growth.
Challenge The re-branded company started publicizing its new name in 2001 through a high-profile global marketing campaign "Now it gets interesting", with a budget of $175 M. The spots ran during 2000 Super Bowl (an American football yearly World Cup). However, the spots advertised didn't do much to Accenture’s brand recognition and failed to achieve its objectives. Analysts categorized the spots as "least recalled" during the event. Increasing competition and lack of new business due to struggling economy didn't bring good results in favor of Accenture. Some of the ads, however, did connect with the high-profile executive audience of Accenture but it failed to bring an impact.
Marketing Strategy With economy gaining pace in 2002, Accenture re-launched a marketing campaign, this time to create an impact and resonate its ideas with executive class audience, mainly the CXO. "I'm your idea" campaign was launched with the message that Accenture had the capabilities to turn ideas into effective business practices. The goal was to make Accenture one of the companies that these executives naturally thought of when considering embarking upon a major projects requiring outside consultants. Accenture experienced a basic behavior of companies when they needed a consultant to work along with i.e. everything starts with an idea, hence the campaign "I'm your idea". The spots displayed ideas triggering in the mind of a middle aged executive and urging him to action on it. For instance, an executive was shown walking with his briefcase in a deserted area while his idea said "Listen, it's me. I'm your idea. I'm what keeps you up at night, I make you restless and maybe even restless". Streetlights and storefront mysteriously lit-up, as though the idea was employing supernatural force to win the executive's attention. The idea continued "After all, it not how many ideas you have, It's how many you make it happen." Business Magazines and business news-papers world-wide were the best way to reach high-level corporate executives. The print advertisements were posted at the airports across United States.
Outcome The campaign was appreciated in the industry and Accenture's brand recall grew from 29 percent to 34 percent. The company concluded that the number of target executives who might consider Accenture as their future partner had tripled. Accenture generated $16 B of booking revenue during the campaign, which was well above their target of $12 M. Accenture's campaign also won 2004 Euro EFFIE award in the corporate category. Looking at the success, the campaign continued till Aug 2003 and a new campaign was unveiled featuring professional-golf start Tiger Woods which lifted Accenture's brand recognition even further.
Outcome The campaign was appreciated in the industry and Accenture's brand recall grew from 29 percent to 34 percent. The company concluded that the number of target executives who might consider Accenture as their future partner had tripled. Accenture generated $16 B of booking revenue during the campaign, which was well above their target of $12 M. Accenture's campaign also won 2004 Euro EFFIE award in the corporate category. Looking at the success, the campaign continued till Aug 2003 and a new campaign was unveiled featuring professional-golf start Tiger Woods which lifted Accenture's brand recognition even further.
Learning for Marketers
2) Brand positioning is a continuous effort. Once unsuccessful, doesn't mean you have failed. Once successful, doesn't mean you will never fail
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