To say that Mark Allatt, global brand director at professional services firm Deloitte, is larger than life is perhaps, a rather obvious observation. And yet, at the same time, it is utterly appropriate in numerous ways. At about 6’8, he towers over even the tallest journalist, talks rapidly but authoritatively and highly coherently, and has an ebullient presence and personality that you can feel almost before he even enters the room.
Allatt is also clearly an enthusiast about Deloitte, about branding, about politics and, most unusually, about steam engines. He is currently leading a project to scratch-build a full size, working replica of a long-scrapped class of express locomotive. As anyone who knows anything about engineering will tell you, this is an enormous undertaking, but Allatt’s team have so far raised over £2.5 million and the project is nearing completion. We’re aiming to have the first runs on the main line by autumn 2008, he proudly booms. Although Allatt is clear that he has had little involvement in the practical hands-on aspects of the project, it seems likely that the success achieved to date has come through sheer force of his personality alone.
The parallels between this project, and the ongoing branding programme that Allatt has led at Deloitte over the last five years may not be immediately apparent, but there is some common ground. When he arrived at the firm in December 2001, its brand was ill-defined, misunderstood, and both poorly managed and communicated. As a result, it was providing limited leverage towards the company’s objective of working with some of the world’s most powerful organisations.
The transformation that has taken place since 2001 is dramatic. Deloitte is now in second place in the big four professional services firms (previously it was sixth out of the big six); has a more rounded service offering that is the envy of its rivals; operates in 135 countries; and is the UK’s biggest employers of graduates.
The role that a strong, clearly-defined and consistently expressed brand has played in this process cannot be understated, and has at the very least underpinned the transformation. Although unlike his steam engine sideline there is no heavy engineering involved, this brand-led organisational reinvention is certainly the more impressive achievement, and bearing in mind that it involves shaping human behaviour and perceptions rather than just steel, is the more significant. Without doubt, the strength of Allatt’s convictions not to say force of his personality have been fundamental in making it happen. He’s certainly not one to shirk a challenge.
The task of transforming a 135,000-strong global organisation into one which is brand-led and brand-focused would clearly have required strong interpersonal and political skills, as well as strength of vision and determination, in order to deal with the various vested interests and organisational factions. Therefore it is not surprising and perhaps even a little ironic that Allatt’s career in marketing originally emerged from a passion for politics. I got bitten by the politics bug whilst I was at university, he explains. If you’ve got an interest in politics, you actually become a natural marketer. You’re marketing an ideal or a principal. Any campaign, or a party or a cause, is a marketing campaign, but with a harder edge. So I suppose I’ve been marketing intangibles since I was at university.
The move to marketing as a profession took place only gradually however, and after graduation he worked for a number of what he describes as, “Thatcherite thinktanks”, jobs which he clearly embarked on with a characteristic sense of gusto. This included some high profile stunts that got him coverage in the national media, but which he declined to discuss in any great detail during this interview, despite B2B Marketing’s best attempts.
Though he clearly enjoyed this period immensely, Allatt says he quickly came to the conclusion that the future potential was limited. I realised that you’ll never earn much money working for a thinktank, he explains. I also realised that I really enjoyed marketing and PR, and that I was quite good at it.
Over the next 10 years, he engineered a gradual but steady progression from technology PR, to professional services branding, via spells at Capgemini (then Hoskyns) KPMG and GVA Grimely. It all sounds like it was nicely planned, but I can assure you it was not quite as simple as that, comments Allatt.
So has he reached the top of the marketing tree? Like a good politician, Allatt answers indirectly. My role at the moment is very brand-focused, which sounds quite narrow, but actually it isn’t because it encompasses anything to do with the corporate agenda. Branding touches everything. Whilst he is certainly still a marketer, in many ways his brief is above and beyond the remit of marketing, both in terms of breadth and depth, reaching a higher strategic level.
The challenge facing Deloitte in 2001, when Allatt arrived as director brand and image development, was certainly more fundamental than marketing communications. Both the firm and the industry more generally had reached a crossroads, with a number of factors potentially influencing its future development.
First was a period of major consolidation, with four firms emerging from the big six and with brands like Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand coming together as PWC. Secondly, the future of the consulting arms of the professional services organisations was being called into question. Allatt explains, This was just at the end of a period of major growth in consulting, particularly in technology. The dotcom bubble had just burst, and companies were wondering what they would do now. The other members of the big four opted to split their consultancy and audit/tax businesses, including the infamous Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting ‘divorce’. Deloitte, meanwhile, opted to hold onto its consultancy arm.
However, most significantly, and largely as a consequence, brand was finally on the radar. The professional services industry had still not long benefited from a relaxation of legislation that had severely restricted all forms of advertising and marketing. (A similar ban remained in place in the legal industry for some years longer.) This meant that in many firms there was no culture of marketing or branding, let alone a widespread understanding of what these functions should do or how to facilitate this.
US-based Arthur Andersen was the exception to the rule. It had grasped the issue of brand and communication, and was using it to great effect, generating a real sense of market leadership. This was really the start of the focus on branding of the professional services sector, says Allatt.
I was brought in because Deloitte recognised that it was time to start focusing on brand and more proactively projecting our brand onto the marketplace. It was also about bringing something together that was more than just the sum of its parts. This was clearly a big challenge, and there was a lot of work that needed doing.
The first objective was to focus on Deloitte’s visual identity, in the broadest sense. Allatt explains, We started with the visual identity because it’s easier to do, and because it makes a tangible statement of change much more quickly than you can achieve through focusing on any other aspect of your brand.
Allatt continues, When you’ve made the visual statement, it is easier to make the changes around how you want people to communicate the brand and how you want them to behave. It made a clear statement that change was happening and it allowed us to build, layer by layer.
The company’s outward persona had previously been overcomplicated and inconsistent, partly as a consequence of its own formation by merger in the 1990s, and was known by different names in different markets sometimes in the same country. These included Deloitte & Touche and Deloitte & Touche Tomatsu. We weren’t a single brand globally, he says.
Working in conjunction with brand agency Enterprise IG, these were rationalised to ‘Deloitte’ in 2003, with a green full stop featuring as part of the logo to emphasise the simplicity of the name. This was communicated across the organisation, with a range of tools and guidelines to explain how the new identity should be used.
We made a deliberate decision to just use Deloitte, because most of our competitors can be [and generally are] shortened to a set of initials, says Allatt. No-one is going to shorten us to ‘D’, and we believe that having a single word makes us more approachable than our competitors. He says this approachability is critical given the way Deloitte works with its customers delivering its various services audit, tax, consulting and corporate finance. It generates standout for us.
He adds that the issue of acronyms is not only a problem for professional services firms, but a broader concern for companies in other B2B markets. There’s a lot of cynicism when it comes to inventing a brand name. You have to think how people refer to your organisation day-in-day-out.
He points to the relatively recent decision of Marks & Spencer to start referring to itself as M&S in its advertising. It’s a recognition that you might not want to be called it, but you are. You don’t ‘own’ your brand, because it exists in the minds of the people who you are trying to influence.
Allatt believes that there are other [mostly] consumer brands that B2B can and should learn from and aspire to. For him, the consistent and coherent approach that Shell has taken to branding singles the oil company out, particularly because of the way it has managed its brand. Shell is still recognisably the same company that it was back in the 1920s, because it has managed its brand over that period and not allowed it to decay. Most rebrands occur because companies have not actively managed their brand. If there isn’t somebody within the organisation to make sure people use the identity in the right way, it will change and it will be abused. Before you know it, you won’t have a coherent face to the market anymore. This is precisely the approach and philosophy that Allatt has been striving to implement at Deloitte.
Once the obvious things like stationary, signage and web presences had been amended, the focus for Deloitte has gradually filtered out to encompass the varied ways in which the brand must work for the organisation, both internally and externally. We’ve been broadening and enriching what we have, says Allatt. There’s been a lot more work on tone of voice for collateral in print, online or face-to-face. We’ve recently embarked on an in-depth audit, which will guide our thinking for the brand going forward.
Like Shell, the Deloitte brand will continue to evolve indefinitely, but with the objective that this will occur subtly. Hopefully you won’t notice it, says Allatt.
Branding then, to use an appropriate railway-orientated metaphor, is like painting the Forth Bridge: in other words never-ending. For the uninitiated, it is so long that once painting has finished, it has to start again at the other end.
The bad news for B2B companies, then, is that branding is not a one-off project it requires continuous attention and investment to remain effective. Is this not likely to prove to be a source of frustration and resentment to company directors? Mark Allatt says in branding terms companies have simple choice between evolution or revolution. You either evolve slowly, keeping a close eye on your organisation, your competitors and your market, to make sure that your public face gives you a competitive edge. Or you remain static and leave it the brand to decline until you are forced to spend an enormous amount of money putting it right. The amount you’d have to spend correcting the problem is a damn sight more than for the evolution model. I think it’s a no-brainer.
Unlike the steam engine project, work on Allatt’s other big project is far from over, although Deloitte is most certainly back on track. The fact that the project is ongoing must not overshadow what has been achieved to date. The firm’s attitude to brand has been transformed and with it to a great extent, its fortunes. Even five years ago, branding was something that was talked about in hushed tones, he says. Now it is on the board agenda.
The irony that Deloitte a firm best known as a provider of services to accountants, who are renowned for their lack of sympathy toward all things brand related has become something of a B2B branding trailblazer is not lost on Allatt. What it proves, however, is that if such an enlightened approach can prove its worth in professional services, it can do so in any company, in any sector.
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