On Sunday, 25 June 2023, news broke that PwC’s global leaders have agreed in principle to sell the firm’s government consulting arm in Australia to private equity investor Allegro Funds for a single Aussie dollar.
Around 130 PwC Australia partners and 1,750 staff will move over to the new company, codenamed Bell, if the deal goes ahead.
The branding of the new consulting entity will be a coveted gig – opportunities like this don’t present themselves every day.
Indeed, the announcement caused me to reflect on one of my own career highlights. In the early 2000s, I was Australia and New Zealand head of marketing for Deloitte Consulting.
By way of reminder, this was immediately post Enron. The US had just passed the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance law that forbade auditors from supplying certain consulting services to audit clients. All of the Big Four accounting firms were scrambling to separate their consulting arms to avoid conflicts of interest.
Deloitte Consulting was preparing to separate globally by way of a management buyout from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and rebrand as Braxton.
Sadly, the buyout failed at the eleventh hour due to “external factors including the tight credit market and the uncertain state of the economy”.
Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day
While Deloitte Consulting was planning to relaunch as Braxton, PwC Consulting had already rebranded as Monday as a precursor to it achieving independence from PricewaterhouseCoopers via an initial public offering.
At the time, PwC Consulting’s CEO stated:
“Our new name is exactly what we want it to be as we create our new business: a real word, concise, recognisable, global. Monday is a new identity on which to build our company’s future, and it will have meaning and stand for something.”
However, barely five weeks later, Monday was purchased by IBM and both the new brand and IPO were scrapped.
IBM integrated (absorbed) PwC Consulting with IBM Global Services.
Two factors heavily influenced IBM’s decision to not retain Monday as PwC Consulting’s new moniker: firstly, the name was widely met with criticism–ridicule, even—and secondly, the strength of the IBM brand was such that a new trademark was deemed foolish.
Brand development takes time
The development of a brand takes time and is ordinarily not something which should be rushed.
It takes time to conceive a name.
It takes time to test the name internally and externally.
It takes time to develop the brand elements (the brand’s positioning strategy, attributes, personality, promise, and values) – as well as the visual identity (the logo, colour palettes, fonts, imagery and other design elements).
It takes time to conduct the legal checks necessary to register a business name and trademark.
In this case, however, to stem the bleed of both PwC clients and key people, there is a sense of urgency. That said, PwC’s ability to satisfy the Commonwealth and State governments, PwC’s partners and staff, and its broader stakeholders of the new company’s independence, stability, governance, and trustworthiness will be more important than the name it chooses.
