The story of Accenture’s 25th anniversary, from the professional name who led the project

In fact, we needed to create an entirely new brand system – identity, signage, business cards and more – which will be revealed to the waiting world on 01/01/01. We quickly realized that we only had late October, just 80 days.

As the Global Director of Naming and Writing at Landor Associates, Andersen Consulting’s registered trademark agency, I was in an emergency meeting with all the major players in leadership, branding, advertising, marketing, and public relations.

The discussion about the implications, roles, responsibilities and timing of the rebrand was moderated by Andersen Consulting’s Global Managing Director of Marketing and Communications, a man who was formerly Dick Cheney’s chief of staff at Andersen Consulting. Halliburton It gave the moment its own gravity.

Andersen Consulting was no ordinary client, and this would be no ordinary assignment. When I look back over 36 years of my career, Accenture It stands alone among thousands of label projects unlike any other.

By 2000, I had four years under my belt at Landor directing naming, nomenclature and name strategy for Andersen Consulting’s market-facing services and offerings.

She felt that Andersen Consulting’s work for its clients required an extraordinary level of precision and diligence. When you design and implement business and technology systems, strategic processes, and change management initiatives for large organizations and entire countries, as Andersen Consulting does, mistakes are not an option.

It enumerated the myriad obstacles to global availability, and outlined the sheer scale and difficulty of the challenge: 47 countries and dozens of trademark categories that the new name would have to clear; Thousands of trademark filings clutter the records every month; Millions of Internet domains are unavailable. I wrote these numbers in thick marker on a large sticky note for everyone to see.

A hidden project made public

Without exception – other than this – the naming of projects is cryptic. The nature of the emerging product or organization that has not yet been announced requires confidentiality. However, I was leading a preliminary renaming meeting, which the whole world knew about, thanks to the very public breakup between Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen.

Andersen Consulting will enlist its entire workforce — 65,000 professionals — to create and submit the names. I was given the task of drafting the naming brief and collaborated on designing a process that would be productive and organized.

I’ve always thought that company naming contests were pretty much a waste of everyone’s time. But the “brand exchange” initiative, as Andersen Consulting called it, was important to the client, so it would be as serious and disciplined as any other aspect of the rebrand.

I knew in my heart that it would be a great story if the new name of Andersen Consulting came from the name of one of them; A testament to the strength and intelligence of their 65,000 advisors. I began to feel a personal responsibility to find the right name among their lists, even knowing that a name created by Landor would give the employer more to brag about.

But this was not a typical project. Instead of allocating weeks to each wave of creative development, we directed the client to introduce new names every few days. During that period, there was no time for legal vetting, so once or twice a week we would sit down with the client and go through long lists of mostly unavailable names, some from Landor’s work, others from staff contributions that I selected.

Looking back, almost all of the naming best practices — allowing ample time for creative development, pre-screening names, and even avoiding company-wide brainstorming — were set aside in this project. What seemed risky elsewhere has become business as usual here. The unconventional operation worked. Our clients kept an open mind when we reviewed names, did not dismiss them frivolously and did not fall in love with unscreened candidates who may have already been trademarked and unavailable.

Over the following weeks, a large number of 550 names were sent to Andersen Consulting’s lawyers for full legal vetting. An astounding 51 orders have passed, an order of magnitude beyond a typical project with only a handful of names reaching this stage. Each of these 51 legally vetted names then underwent global market research and native speaker screening, while Landor was tasked with developing 51 unique visual identities.

Even the proofreading was phenomenal. I was asked to compile all the languages ​​spoken in 47 countries for Andersen Consulting.

In the end, 65 languages ​​were tested, with three native speakers each, to ensure that no unintended meanings leaked out. To this day, I don’t think any naming project in history has been so thoroughly examined.

October arrived. Andersen Consulting convened its 2,500 senior partners in Miami to coordinate a smooth changeover on January 1. I was to present 51 names directly from the hall podium, with partners voting for their top picks on printed ballots.

Then plans changed: Maybe someone got nervous about offering my direct name. The decision was made that I would hand the film to the camera instead, so staff took me to a hotel room that had been converted into a makeshift movie set, complete with a TV backdrop and blinding Fresnel lights. As always, the film crew was preparing to document this moment.

While the cameras were rolling, I was selling each name as best I could, enumerating each name’s relative strengths, implications, and opportunities. At one point, the footage was edited to perfection before being shown to 2,500 senior partners in the audience.

Accenture was already a leading name among the C-Suite at Andersen Consulting. CEO Joe Forehand, to whom I applied several times, was keen. When the lead partner vote — recorded in a spreadsheet — showed Accenture leading the second-best name by a wide margin, it seemed like fate.

It also seemed…weird.

In large groups, sounds tend to spread across a range of nouns. When, as in this case, 2,500 people vote on 50 names and someone runs away with it, something else happens.

Accenture was certainly a strong and strategic name, but so were others. But I also think that people naturally gravitate toward what feels familiar to them. Show someone a list of possible names and ask them which one they “like” the most, and they’ll pick the one that rings a bell.

The name Andersen Consulting is often shortened to AC. AC.com was their URL. Andersen’s logo, designed by Landor, featured a capital A with a raised C (nicknamed “A to the power of C”).

This was the only name that started with AC. It provided a modicum of familiarity while also providing a strategic justification as a “tone for the future.”

Twenty-five years after the birth of the Accenture name, the number of its employees has increased from 65,000 employees to 779,000 employees, and its revenues have increased from $11.44 billion to $69.67 billion. I can’t imagine better measures of success for a lifelong naming project.

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