“I’d rather pitch against Accenture Song than The Monkeys,” one agency wag observed yesterday on social media. It will also reduce the agility of the company because suddenly there is just one giant billion-dollar behemoth with little pre-existing reputation in the industry. On the negative side, this consolidation might encourage an exodus of talented, formerly loyal employees. The move from being a house of brands to a single operating sub-brand of Accenture, with all the brands now consolidated into one single company, is massive. Some of those agencies, like The Monkeys and Karmarama, are very big and feted operations. But the real meat of the move is a massive change in brand architecture.Īccenture Interactive was simply a holding group that acquired 30-plus agencies over the last five years. We should not make the mistake of most marketers on Twitter, and obsess about the new name while missing the much bigger play that is taking place. Song as a creative balance to Accenture makes a lot of sense. Song on its own is a load of creative wanky-wank. In fact, the juxtaposition of the boring, Android-run accounting parent brand with the more jaunty, lyrical Song sub-brand is the main reason why the score for the name is actually positive here. But this is a sub-brand, and the power and pre-existence of the Accenture name will more than compensate for any confusion or jollity. Telling people you work for Song is probably not going to earn you much respect, and will cause all kinds of odd questions from Nan about the move into a music career. One of the big problems with PwC (yes, them again) rebranding its consulting arm as Strategy& was the unfortunate moment when employees had to tell someone where they worked, and then watch as that person waited in silence for the rest of a sentence that never came. The acid test for Song is how it sounds when employees are asked on a Friday, down the pub, where they work. It’s a bit wanky and up itself, but not half as bad as many of the alternatives. I am not quite as critical as some of my peers when it comes to the actual name ‘Song’. Follow The National Lottery’s example: Don’t rebrand, revitalise 2. There is a long and painful list of companies – starting with PwC Consulting, which briefly and infamously became Monday for a few magical hours – that rebranded themselves and then lived to regret it. Twenty years ago, Arthur Andersen wanted its surname back and Accenture was the result of a rather splendid three-month process. But it made the move for the only legitimate reason you ever embark on a rebrand – because you legally have to.
That’s how low the bar for rebranding is.Īccenture, of course, is a rebranded company already, having begun life as Andersen Consulting. Never forget that the most successful rebranding case studies, like Diageo, for example, are the ones that did no harm to the long-term performance of the business. You lose a ton of salience and employee loyalty, while opening yourself up to criticisms of superficiality and indulgent identity wank. When I teach brand management, I spend a very long time on repositioning and revitalisation, but move much more quickly when I get to rebranding. Accenture Song therefore starts its existence with a big fat -10. Any company that decides, voluntarily, to rebrand itself is asking for trouble. So, given the musical direction of the newly minted super-agency, let’s conduct a Eurovision-style assessment and assign scores for the various aspects of the Song decision. And partly because the new name has sparked much debate around the marketing village over the last 48 hours. Partly because there are more than 30 famous global agency brands caught up in the consolidation. Partly because of the £13bn in revenues that the group is likely to generate this year. But, make no mistake, this is very big marketing news. That’s obviously a massive load of old consulting bollocks. The new brand name is meant to convey an “enduring and universal form of human craft, connection, inspiration, technical prowess and experience” and will unleash – yes, unleash – “the imagination and ideas of its people to deliver tangible results”.
In a move that has been widely expected, the digital communications arm of Accenture renamed and restructured itself on Tuesday.