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ACCA

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ACCA

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) is the world’s leading professional accountancy body, supporting 170,000 members and 436,000 students in 180 markets. With such diverse operations, it was becoming increasingly challenging to maintain a consistent message and build a coherent image across the globe.

We conducted an in-depth discovery process, including auditing current activity, reviewing existing research, conducting interviews with stakeholders around the world and facilitating workshops with the core team. This process uncovered that all the competitors had a niche focus, be it a specific region, customer set or profession. ACCA on the other hand had more breadth to their offering. They catered for a wider range of students, offered a wider range of courses and covered more countries around the world. The opportunity was to make a virtue of their breadth versus their narrower competitors.

More is more
Our strategic and creative teams worked hand-in-hand to translate this observation into a compelling story to build the brand around. We observed that everyone has a different view of what success looks like, and that everyone takes a different path to get there. Because the ACCA has a greater breadth than competitors, they are able to offer a wider range of routes to success. The brand idea off which everything would hang became ‘we offer more paths to success than anyone else’.

 

Microsite homepage

ACCA Paths To Success Diagram

An infographic detailing the numerous paths to success, and to becoming a member of ACCA

Draw your future
This new positioning would need to be communicated across a wide range of markets, using many different channels. A launch campaign was needed, but it needed to be flexible enough to adapt to the ACCA’s global challenges. Our creative idea was to show students drawing their own vision of what success was to them. It was universally understood and easily re-executed to talk to different markets.

Office of Fair Trading

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Office of Fair Trading

Problems with unsatisfactory goods cost consumers an estimated £2 billion a year. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) wanted to improve knowledge of the Sale of Goods Act amongst businesses. Their goal was to see more complaints being resolved by businesses themselves in order to reduce the need for government intervention.

The OFT’s approach consisted of long guidance documents written in a dry and legal tone. They wanted a fresh approach. Our strategy team delivered a comprehensive engagement programme with businesses of all sizes—from corner shops to multinationals. We observed that these were busy people and getting them to devote time to improving their knowledge of the Sale of Goods Act was extremely challenging. They found the current materials hard to use because their staff all had different needs—till workers needed short summaries, legal directors wanted detailed information and human resources sought training materials. While the materials needed to be legally accurate, they also needed to be jargon-free and easy for a layperson to understand in order to be suitable for the audience.

Serious doesn’t have to mean boring
Our solution was to develop a website that could house a range of materials, each one designed to meet the needs of a different user—short summaries for till workers, quizzes for training and detailed guidance for lawyers. Working closely with the OFT’s legal team, our copywriters were able to turn their legal output into engaging materials. Observing that serious doesn’t have to mean boring, our design team took a dry subject and presented the content in a simple, friendly and fun manner. Working with a digital partner, we built a website to house the new content in one, easy-to-access location.

The Sale of Goods Act online hub – simple, friendly and fun

We brought campaign illustrations to life in an animated film that explains the Sale of Goods Act hub, and why it’s a powerful tool for businesses

‘Explained’ is a booklet that talks businesses through various scenarios they may find themselves in with customers, and the proper actions they should take

Posters promoting the SOGA hub

Independent research was commissioned to evaluate the project, which found that retailers had observed their staff becoming more confident and empowered in customer dealings and that less queries were being referred upwards from stores.

Following the success of the Sale of Goods Act hub, our approach has become a blueprint for regulatory guidance, and has been rolled out to a number of other areas of regulation.

The Distance Selling online hub

Unfair Terms hub: How To Guide – Typographic illustrations were derived from the visual language of terms and conditions and business-to-consumer contracts

Unfair Terms: Explained

“It’s a brilliant resource, brilliantly done. It’s filling a gap for businesses.”

Retail business staff member

 

 

Science says everyone can be creative

Creative, Squad, Strategy, , , ,

 

Science says everyone can be creative

For much of history, creativity was characterised as a moment of genius occurring to a gifted individual. Our industry has done much to reinforce this view. Certain jobs are labelled ‘creative’. And by inference, others aren't. Typically the creative jobs are the artistic functions: art directing, graphic designing and copywriting.

Science now provides us with a better understanding of creativity. It shows that our understanding has been limited and that we could make much better use of the creative talent in everyone.

Robert Wiesberg of Philadelphia’s Temple University has used experiments and case studies since the early 1960s to show that creative thinking is in fact a process of problem solving.

What differentiates it from any other thought process is that the outcome is a creative one. So creativity is not a process, but an outcome.

Design thinking has gained a lot of prominence recently. The principle being that the thought processes used by designers can be applied to solve a wide range of problems.

Viewing creativity as a problem-solving process is something we focus on within our work and culture. Our website contains a quote from Einstein, who said that if he had 1 hour to save the world, he’d spend 59 minutes defining the problem and 1 minute developing the solution.

If creativity is a process then understanding how we apply ourselves to this process is crucial. We all have two hemispheres within our brains – often referred to as right and left. Each of these performs different functions. The left brain is verbal, logical and analytical. The right side is visual, intuitive and holistic.

Mark Beeman has researched and written extensively in this area. His work shows that there are two modes of thinking that we can apply to problem solving: insight and analysis.

Analysts tackle problems in a methodical way. At any time they can explain where their thought process is up to and what their best current thinking is.

Insightfuls produce answers through what appear to be eureka moments. But in reality these are the result of subconscious thought processes. As a result, people who think in this way either have an answer or they don’t.

People are often characterised as either left-or right-brain thinkers and indeed we all have a natural tendency towards one or the other thought processes. But we all have the capability – if nurtured – to do both. The best ideas result from applying both thought processes. Insightful thinking is best suited to idea generation. While analytical thinking is required to critique and refine ideas.

By understanding our natural tendencies, we can become more conscious about how we think and therefore how creative we are. While this is fine in theory, how easy it is in reality is a different matter.

The important thing for our industry is understanding that a scientist, engineer or strategist has as much capacity to be creative as someone with an artistic skill set. As the breadth of skills needed to build brands expands, it is vital to recognise this.

Within our own business, the creative concepting process is a true collaboration between designers, writers, strategists and clients. While everyone may not have the capability to visualise an idea, all of us have the capacity to produce the all-important moment of insight.

— RG

References:

  •  How To Fly A Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, Kevin Ashton
  •  Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer
  •  Want A Eureka Moment? Choose A Deadline, John Kounios, Wired – May 2016

Brother

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Brother

Brother has an illustrious history within technology hardware: the inventor of the fax machine and a pioneer in printing, but not as a software company. However, the market for technology was changing and Brother wanted to move more into software and services.

Software is sold very differently to hardware. Printers are sold through a long distribution channel, where the retailer at the end of the chain can drive sales for you. Software is increasingly sold online, direct to the end user. This meant many of Brother’s ingrained approaches to marketing would have to change.

One of their first software products was OmniJoin, which allows users to hold online meetings.

We worked with Brother to conduct research into the market. We audited customer research and engaged channel/retail partners. On the back of this we developed a full marketing strategy and plan for how they should approach selling this.

Join the enlightened

We developed the messaging and creative campaign needed to make the plan happen. This was born out of the insight that online meetings are still in their infancy, some people aren’t aware that the software exists, let alone what its capabilities are. Others are using the same software as they use to speak to their grannies. Our creative idea celebrated a new breed of innovators who had moved their meetings online and were experiencing incredible benefits for their home and work lives. We painted a picture of how the enlightened are working: progressive, nimble, productive and meeting online. We made people want to work and meet like this. And we invited others to join them.

 

Create the tools for action
We produced a campaign toolkit that summarised the marketing strategy and contained all the creative assets that partner agencies would need to deploy the campaign. Part brand guidelines; part campaign guidelines, it included messaging, boilerplate copy, advertising, imagery, design style and branding, ensuring a continuity of visual, verbal and strategic components across multiple disciplines.

“Squad are my go-to partner when I need an in-depth, 360 degree understanding of a challenge. They are a rare breed in their ability to strategically and commercially interrogate a brief, providing unique value early in the process.  Coupled with insightful creative solutions, they provide a combination of expertise that delivers long-term return on investment.”

Dave Peters – Development and Strategy Director, Brother UK