PA Consulting

Defining a Strategic Brand Identity & Innovation Platform.

Helping define a point of difference for PA Consultancy.

Engagement

The Challenge

PA Consulting is a 70 year old global consultancy firm that once counted Accenture as its closest competitor and rubbed shoulders with the giants of the industry. However, after a 20 year period of little marketing spend, the brand had fallen outside of most organisations’ consideration set, and the acquisition and retention of talent had become a major challenge.

Like many others in the professional service industries, PA’s issues started with their ambition - which focused more on the successful emulation of others, than on the production of their own highly differentiated brand. Because of this risk averse attitude and lack of differentiation, PA struggled to compete on anything other than value, which whilst useful in picking up public sector contracts, does not play so well when wooing the private sector.

To further complicate matters, the organisation had just restructured its offering around services and sectors, with the intention of taking them to market as individual sub-brands in the future, despite little to no brand awareness.

The Process

To help put PA back on the map, Matter Of Form developed a new brand strategy drawing attention to the organisation’s unparalleled technology and innovation capability - which has seen them invent some of the century’s most influential inventions, from the world’s first digital telephone exchange to the first home pregnancy test.

The new ‘We Make The Difference’ brand platform served as a rallying cry. Not just to staff members and existing clients around the world, but to the market as well. Giving PA a unique voice for the first time in over two decades - and allowing them to communicate what truly makes them different. From their 250 scientists, engineers and technologists in their Cambridge Innovation Labs, to their commitment to building the best bespoke teams for clients, comprised of the highest calibre talent from around the world.

To bring this new strategy and positioning to life, MOF developed a new expression system inspired not by other consultancies, but by the technology companies that most reflect their values and newly found sense of self. Resulting in a bright, vibrant and flat design language that oozes modernity, and takes them from a stale category of many, to a pioneering category of one.

In addition, MOF developed a new architecture for the brand. Giving them distinctive graphical design elements to represent the individual sector and service sub-brands; which, when combined together have the ability to depict the life story of the business and it’s projects over time - through the clustering of components around a DNA like sequence.

The Output

After this initial work, MOF created a set of brand guidelines that formalised the new strategy into a concise document for staff members and other stakeholders to work from. Alongside this, MOF created a suite of internal marketing materials and processes to help guide the company’s transition to its new positioning.

MOF are now PA’s official brand agency and creative agency of record. Having subsequently used the brand platform to produce some of the most celebrated and successful global consultancy advertising campaigns of the past two years.