The commercial challenge
Deloitte had many strong supporters but its brand tracking told it that consideration was low. Why? Because of a lack of differentiation. Deloitte Do was a response to this; it was created to deliver distinctiveness in a sea of corporate sameness.
Objectives
- Drive a defined position in the market
- Have a voice on issues that matter to our clients
- Enable our 17,000 people to answer ‘Why Deloitte?’
- Integrate campaign activity and messaging across the business
The company developed a brand campaign, Deloitte Do, which brought this to life by positioning Deloitte as an action-orientated brand that solves the issues keeping business leaders awake at night. Not just by talking about it, but by doing it.
Did it work?
The response exceeded expectations:
- 77% of our people have engaged internally
- 30,000 unique external users have visited our website
- A significant uplift in brand recognition from the c-suite audience in a Financial Times survey
- Client’s compliments
- It’s taking off overseas – a Swiss member firm will launch Deloitte Do in August.
About
Deloitte is one of the ‘big four’ professional services firms. In the past 10 years it:
- Acquired leadership specialists
- Started and grew Deloitte Digital into one of the top 10 digital agencies in the world
- Invested in start-ups
- Started its own start-ups
- Created partnerships with the likes of McLaren and Apple
- Grew its consulting business into the largest in the world.
Strategy
Deloitte’s last major advertising campaign was in 2007-08 and its most recent ‘brand investment’ was in 2012 with its official sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Following a focus on developing key client relationships, a recent study identified that it lagged on differentiation and consideration compared to its UK competitors.
Deloitte felt its reputation didn’t do justice to the realities of its capabilities.
It drew on the breadth of expertise across its marketing function and assembled a cross-department team, who met weekly and worked collaboratively with each other and its agency, acting as ambassadors across the wider department. In turn, the team was 100% aligned to the priority areas of the business and through them our clients.
The ‘Deloitte Do’ team
- Corporate marketing: Oversight of our corporate campaigns and assets.
- Digital: How our target audience consume content. Developing a consistent user journey.
- Internal comms: Helping our people understand the rationale for the campaign and getting them excited.
- Client impact and intelligence: Drawing on the behaviours and perceptions of our target audience.
- Creative studio: What can we do across our marketing deliverables to embed action-orientation?
- PR: What topics are resonating with our audience and key influencers?
- Service line and industry market leads: What are key client themes? How are we responding? What are our upcoming campaigns?
Context: Industry threats and issues
Deloitte was facing a major consideration challenge. The underlying cause of this problem was a lack of differentiation; if everyone feels, looks and sounds the same, how do busy, pressured decision-makers choose between them? Its creative executions were designed to differentiate Deloitte by showing the sheer breadth of its services and its ability to deliver on complex projects.
The target audience
Primary: Senior business decision makers at its largest clients and targets
- Low volume, high value targets
- Hard to reach in a crowded market
- Constantly on the go (77% take up to 30 business trips a year)
- Avid consumers of content (Consuming 25% more media than the average adult each day)
- Tech savvy – mobile, tablet users
- Action-oriented, impatient, comfortable with risk.
Secondary: Our people
A key channel to market and in changing the perceptions of its clients and targets.
Tertiary: Journalists, influencers and public stakeholders
Third party voices can be a powerful influence on its primary audience.
Marketing objectives
- Drive a defined position in the market
- Have a voice on the issues that matter to its clients
- Enable its people to answer ‘Why Deloitte?’
- Integrate its activity and messaging
- Increase distinctiveness to improve consideration.
Examples of marketing activities conducted within the timeframe
Deloitte Do is a creative response to the consideration challenge. It is:
- Led by the issues that matter to its primary audience
- Communicated in a confident, clear and human tone. No corporate speak allowed
- Purpose led with a clear link to Deloitte’s global purpose, “making an impact that matters”.
An integrated campaign design
Deloitte built awareness through its out-of-home advertising in business hubs such as Heathrow, Canary Wharf and London City Airport and targeted digital advertising in publications and websites. It invested in semantic matching to target relevant articles. And, given the action-oriented position, up-weighted its media spend on Mondays, when its audience was more driven and focused on what to achieve that week.
It cascaded through firm-wide communications, office signage and a Deloitte Do film, celebrating people that turn talk into action. It amplified this by driving conversations online via influencers and social media.
Deloitte’s marketing and business development teams worked to meet a core set of competencies and its learning and development agenda supports development by grade and across strategic, soft and technical skills. It’s through ongoing L&D that Deloitte has a market-leading team that can deliver ‘stretch’ programmes like Deloitte Do.
Results
Our objectives
- Drive a defined position in the market
- Have a voice on the issues that matter to our clients
- Enable our people to answer ‘Why Deloitte?’ Integrate our activity and messaging.
What are we measuring?
- Awareness
- Engagement
- Engagement and feedback from our people
- Extent to which Deloitte Do has been embedded across the business.
Proof of success
- Client feedback and the scale of its impressions (1.7 million c-suite via the Financial Times alone) has seen a significant uplift in brand understanding and recognition
- +67% ‘Deloitte is all about delivering on its clients’ objectives’
- +50% ‘Deloitte makes an impact for its clients’
- Excellent client feedback such as: “Beautifully simple, clear in its intent and a clearly differentiated market position.”
- 40% lower bounce rate than Deloitte average.
DeloitteDo has made nearly 10 million impressions
Its people are behind the campaign:
- 77% of our people engaged with the campaign
- On launch it distributed 8,000 copies of its Do book.
Its marketers brought Deloitte Do to life
- Remarketing 25 of its insights with bespoke ‘to do’ lists
- Branding client events and service line partner conferences
"The unanimous approval from my executive was testament to the buy-in and conviction that the leadership had in the potential of the campaign. And the feedback to date has demonstrated we were right to be so confident!”
