Accenture announces 'Accenture Song' – not a tune, but a rebrand If you want to place a bet on the winner of 2022's weirdest corporate rebranding, here's one likely to make the shortlist: an announcement titled "Accenture Announces Accenture Song". No, dear reader, that missive does not mean that Accenture has penned a corporate anthem. Which is a shame because The Register quite fancies …
The Reg of days passim would have gleefully larded an article such as this with sarcastic references to joss-sticks and whalesong. Instead, not so much as a mention. Don't tell me your new image - no longer "Biting the Hand that Feeds IT", I notice - is too straight-laced for such mockery?
Cancelling my subscription in disgust, etc etc.
After 25 years, I feel I am just about ready to relive the absolute horror that was - as a lowly employee of Philips Research Labs - being subjected to this gem of the art:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Mlf3dQusk
Ahh, those were the days. Apart from the occasional bit of corporate bullshit like this, Philips was a great company to work for. And at least, knowing the leadership, you could console yourself with the knowledge that a phenomenal amount of weed had probably been smoked in whatever room they came up with the idea in.
"The name Accenture Song conveys an enduring and universal form of human craft, connection, inspiration, technical prowess and experience [...]"
This (and the logo) are just two more examples of output from modern 'creative agencies' which spend their entire working time trying to demonstrate how 'creative' they are while for the most part slavishly following often fast changing fashion trends. Clarity, relevance to the client's purpose etc. etc. are a foreign language to these 'talented people'.
I can't forget the day one of my professional associations rebranded. The 'creatives' replaced the simple and perfectly recognisable logo with a cyan/magenta squiggly line that is easily mistaken for innumerable other organisations' cyan/magenta squiggly lines. I guess cyan/magenta squiggly lines were 'trending' at that moment.
One company I worked for had a change of name...... It was a subsidiary of a very large international brand. The 'old' name was well known in the industry and had a good reputation (and I thought did a good job). A grand project renamed the junior company to a non-word which, when spoken, sounded appropriate to the type of project undertaken, but only in French..... There was a huge roll-out, with freebies, advertising and massive re-branding involving reprinting a lot of documents.
After about a year the 'new' name was quietly dropped.
but only in French
Unlike the big telecoms merger between GEC and Plessey, which created GEC-Plessey Telecommunications, a mouthful generally shorted to "GPT".
This always caused amusement among French colleagues, where it would have been pronounced the same as "J'ai pété" - "I have farted".
And we lost the great Plessey logo of a squiggle on an oscilloscope looking like "plessey" in cursive script.
Slightly off topic there's "Hector the Tax Inspector"
Unlike all the examples we laugh about now, the second was produced in house for about 50p, and the former probably by someone who understood the business, not a "creative" in sight.
And this is probably as good an anecdote about branding as you will find
https://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/01/04/bbc-marketing-head-admits-w1as-satirical-rebrand-cursed-new-bbc-three-logo
That's right, because nobody else in the IT industry uses creativity, technology and intelligence do they?
If you're going to pay a fortune to some "branding imagineers", at least have the braincells to check that what they come up with isn't total bullshit before you proudly announce it to mass derision.
Not that this will stop their clueless corporate clients from queuing up with wheelbarrows full of cash, desperate to buy a "metaverse strategy".
IBM had an entire songbook. It was real. I held a physical copy in my own hands when I worked at IBM long ago (OK, circa 1990). In addition to the usual music and lyrics, it had black-and-white photos of choruses of besuited IBMers dutifully singing some of the numbers.
Corporate songs, songbooks, and even full-fledged musicals were A Thing in the US for a while.
And surely everyone knows the KPMG song? That one's famous. There are a bunch of remixes on YouTube.
Deloittes released a CD back in 1999 called "Second Wave"
(And, while searching for that link, I see that they are still using the "second wave" branding even now - a mere 20+ years later.)
[Icon: Paris because she looks like she's trying to sticker her fingers in her ears!]
.... I seem to remember a very ambitious manager in the USA created something and tried to get it to be officially adopted. It was doing the rounds in the early 2000s - I suspect in the USA as a serious thing, in the UK it was sent as a joke.
Don't have a copy of it unfortunately, but it was as bad as you imagine
Decades ago I worked for Arthur Andersen Consulting before it became Andersen Consulting before it became Accenture before it became Accenture Song and I apologize for any contribution I might have made to this fiasco of a company.
In atonement, I will identify the song.
It's from a children's (appropriate) puppet (also appropriate) show hosted by Shari Lewis called Lamb Chop's Play-Along.
"This is the song that doesn't ends
Yes, it goes on and on, my friends
Some people started singing it not knowing what it was
And they′ll continue singing it forever just because"
Repeat ad infinitum or ad nauseum, whichever comes first.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_47KVJV8DU
I was a victim of Anderson. When they were introduced, I thought, in my naivety, it might be related to the themed-puppet producers. How right I was.
Our company was bloated with too many managers and too many outdated systems. The manager-to-worker ratio went up and the number of systems increased by one.
At least those colleagues who remained weren't given a song to sing. In retrospect, I think Anderson did me (and many others) a favour.
it's laughable regardless. In my language, there's a saying taken from an 17th c. work on 'natural world', for entry / description of a horse the author wrote: the image of a horse is for everyone to know (see).
After doing a stint with Accenture, this definitely seems to fit with their general approach of focusing on all the wrong things. Racist hiring practices? Who cares when we can rebrand to some name that will just baffle customers? A more cynical side of myself wonders if they didn't also reincorporate to try to get out from under lawsuits and investigations into their various business practices.
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