Tiger Gets New Stripes: Accenture Launches New Global Advertising and Marketing Campaign Based on Three-Year ‘High Performance Business’ Research
NEW YORK; Sept. 25, 2006 – Accenture today launched a new global advertising and marketing campaign based on its groundbreaking High Performance Business research program and featuring golf icon Tiger Woods.
For three years, Woods has been the embodiment of high performance in Accenture’s global integrated marketing campaign. In one respect, Accenture’s new campaign has a familiar look: Tiger doing what he does best out on the golf course. But it quickly becomes evident that there is something more to the campaign, in both appearance and content.
Accenture’s new campaign builds on the Tiger Woods phenomenon by spelling out the ingredients for becoming a high-performance business. It captures the key findings of that research in a variety of print, television, online and airport poster ads with the tagline: “We know what it takes to be a Tiger.”
The ads translate Woods’ actions on the golf course into the traits shared by “high-performance businesses” – from foresight and preparation to having the flexibility to adjust and adapt when circumstances require it. High performers also focus on “relentless consistency” and take the leap from “focusing on outperforming the competition to outperforming themselves.”
The campaign is based on a three-year Accenture research program that analyzed 6,000 companies worldwide and identified what it takes to be a high-performing organization — one that out-performs peers across business and economic cycles, often across generations of leadership, and as measured by widely accepted financial metrics. Of the 6,000 companies surveyed, only 500 met the criteria for high performers. A recent Harvard Business Review survey recognized Accenture’s research program as one of the 10 most notable initiatives in the field during the past quarter century.
“From the outset, we were determined that our High Performance Business strategy would be based on substantive research and knowledge that would enable us to frame the dialogue with our clients in new ways and enable us to share insights to help them drive higher performance,” said James E. Murphy, Accenture’s chief marketing & communications officer. “Accenture now holds a proprietary body of knowledge about high performance that is unmatched in our industry. The new campaign showcases our compelling and differentiated knowledge, experience and capabilities, directly supporting our high-performance position and strategy.”
The new campaign launches in 23 countries and includes an increased investment in interactive activities. The campaign kicks off the week of Sept. 25 with television spots running during the Accenture-sponsored World Golf Championships - American Express Championship in which Tiger Woods is scheduled to compete. The ads will also appear on CNN, Fox TV, ABC TV, ESPN and the Golf Channel during the course of the campaign. The print campaign begins the week of Sept. 25 in the United States and will also run in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, China and the United Kingdom. Print ads are scheduled to appear in top business and news publications including the Financial Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Le Figaro, Il Sole 24 Ore, Expansion, and Nikkei Business, plus global editions of The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.
Launched three years ago, Accenture’s High Performance Business campaign featuring Tiger Woods has achieved tremendous success. It has been the company’s most successful global integrated marketing campaign in its nearly 20 years of creating award-winning campaigns. A recent survey of senior executives found that Accenture’s brand identity has increased steadily and surpassed those of its competitors since Accenture launched its High Performance Delivered positioning and the “Go on. Be a Tiger” campaign. Accenture’s relationship with Tiger Woods is his first and only business-to-business endorsement.
“Tiger continues to be the ideal representative for our High Performance Business strategy,” Murphy said. “The world associates Tiger with high performance. He embodies the relentless pursuit of perfection, and we are delighted to continue our relationship with him.”
The new print advertising campaign preserves the proven appeal of Tiger Woods with bold images of the golf icon in action as the visual foundation (much like the former print advertisements). But the new campaign incorporates a new visual element—a mnemonic device that charts the insights and knowledge that Accenture has identified through its ground-breaking research into 6,000 companies about what it takes to be a high-performance business.
Over each Tiger Woods image is a hand-drawn white line broken into segments (much like sportscasters use during sports coverage) accompanied by captions that include percentages breaking down the essential ingredients of a particular high-performance behavior such as having “hindsight,” or being able to plan for and seize opportunities, to “stick-to-itiveness,” where high performance is achieved not through luck but by hard work and diligence.
As part of the campaign, Accenture will add new interactive tools to its website, www.accenture.com, and expand traditional efforts in direct marketing, conferences and thought leadership events. For example, the ads will direct the audience to a High Performance Business section on the site (https://www.accenture.com/Global/High_Performance_Business/default.htm) where the campaign continues with more in-depth educational and interactive components. The section also includes a new element in addition to the standard content that is a flash presentation explaining the research, its findings and how it was conducted.
In addition, simultaneous to the campaign launch, the September 2006 issue of Outlook, Accenture’s journal of high-performance business, features the results of the company’s High Performance Business research program, including background on the initiative, details on its proprietary methodology, along with the key findings that clearly define the drivers of superior performance.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Committed to delivering innovation, Accenture collaborates with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With deep industry and business process expertise, broad global resources and a proven track record, Accenture can mobilize the right people, skills and technologies to help clients improve their performance. With more than 133,000 people in 48 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$15.55 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2005. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
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Lisa Gordon-Miller
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