Nick Law, the creative chairperson of Accenture Song, has said his company’s marriage of business understanding and customer experience, gives it a unique advantage.
Speaking in the Lumière theatre at Cannes Lions, Law said it was “surprising” that so many companies and agencies cannot connect the dots between customer experience and good business results.
“I think it was Peter Drucker who said you don’t have a business without a customer. So customers are really important. But you also don’t have a business or a customer without a product,” he said.
“The first principle of thinking for me as a business person is the product and rather than making a choice on the business or customer, you choose the product so that you bring the other two things together.
“This seems obvious that it’s surprising how many times you can create a great customer experience that has no business model attached or you make a business decision and don’t end up with a great customer experience.”
Launching into something akin to a sales pitch, the former Apple marketer said, “We [Accenture Song] have competitors some of whom are in this room who really do great customer experience. And we have competitors in the consulting who are really good at understanding business growth.
“Our capabilities at Accenture Song are design, digital products, marketing and commerce services. All of these things are business-facing and customer-facing and we work at the intersection of those things. All the work I’m about to show you is a mix of connecting these different practices. If you can do that, you can solve harder problems and innovate.”
Law showed off Accenture Song’s work for diamond miner De Beers, which he said was facing an existential threat from lab-grown diamonds. Working together Accenture Song helped make its customer values – the authentic provenance of natural diamonds and their uniqueness compared to lab-grown diamonds.
“Their competitors were making a beautiful object but they weren’t that [a unique diamond],” he said.
Accenture Song created a digital product that showcased a customer diamond’s unique form and provenance, connecting the customer experience and the business demand. The inference being that only Accenture Song would have the wherewithal to understand De Beers’ business demands and create a product that meets them.
Next on Law’s hitlist was the performance and brand dichotomy – something that Accenture Song can apparently straddle because of its deep expertise in both digital, performance and branding.
“The truth is that we have developed these two tribes in our industry. There is the venerable tribe of brand marketing, people that are really good at telling stories and understand how to position a brand…” he said.
“Now at the bottom, we’ve got performance marketing which is a more emergent set of marketers, first on the agency and then on the client side. They really understand media and technology. But typically are pretty heartless when it comes to conveying amazing creative. The problem with this setup is that they pull apart like oil and water. The top tribe is a tribe of artists and the bottom tribe is a tribe of mathematicians. But we need both of them.”
In Law’s mind, this over-specialisation of marketing functions has created an industry that can only conceive of itself working at the top or the bottom of the funnel – abandoning the middle where the most effective, but challenging marketing happens.
“Our industry is shaped like an hourglass, we’ve vacated the middle because of the magnetism of these two ends,” he explained.
“What we’re trying to get from the customer is make them feel something and that will make them act. The problem is that they’re only going to do something because they understand. If you understand something, you’re more likely to feel it and if you understand, you’re more likely to act. This is something that the great connector Steve Jobs understood when he did campaigns like “1,000 Songs In Your Pocket” and “There’s An App For That.”
“He built a brand off this sort of product advertising that clarified the value of the brand in the middle,” added Laws.
“They’re particularly ruinous these two tribes because the way that the customer is behaving is not an hourglass, it looks like an onion. We’ve vacated the very place where our customers are making decisions. They’re making decisions on third-party sites because brands have vacated the middle.”
He showed that through Accenture Song’s work with Spotify in Brazil, the brand was able to meet customers where they are – i.e. the middle of the funnel – with digital creative that both makes them feel and entices them to act. Rather than continuing with the disconnected ends of the hourglass, Accenture Song turned Spotify’s market into the onion.
“The core of this campaign is the playlist. The playlist is the product. We developed playlists that acknowledge how they’re doing in the world – they’re lonely, stinky and a whole bunch of other things,” he said.
“This looks like bottom of the funnel, but it’s not, it’s dignified with the craft of brand marketing and it starts with the product.”
