Finance and HR software has long been dominated by Goliaths SAP and Oracle. Compared to them In brand awareness, Workday has been a distant #3. To convince executives to switch to Workday, we had to:

1) Close the brand awareness gap with Oracle and SAP. Changing your enterprise software is compared to having your spine ripped out because it’s high-stakes and painful. Risk-averse executives are less likely to ink a seven-figure contract with a brand they don’t know as well as the entrenched competition.

2) Differentiate Workday from the competitors SAP and Oracle, by clearly positioning Workday as an innovator in a fast-changing world. Workday let our audience know that they didn’t have to settle for the limitations of legacy vendors and introduced a new class of enterprise software that could help fuel acceleration in a changing world.

We live in a world where change is the only constant, and it's happening faster than ever. In order for organizations to keep up—and keep growing— they need a system that's designed to adapt automatically to their changing needs. They need Workday.

We developed our new brand platform "For a Changing World" to position Workday as an innovator that helps business not only deal with the dizzying pace of change, but embrace it.

We spoke with industry analysts, consultants, employees, and existing customers who helped us identify that an acceleration gap exists within most companies today. Their existing skills, resources, and systems are no match for the pace of change driven by new technology.

And the data backs that up. According to IDC, a global market intelligence firm, a whopping 80% of companies find it impossible to adapt their HR and Finance systems to new requirements linked to digital transformation.

Our audience was “The Change Suite” – C-suite executive and their teams that are tasked with helping their companies change so they can operate at greater speed and efficiency.

Our approach was to develop a new brand platform that makes Workday the go-to partner for companies trying catch up with, and get ahead of, the dizzying pace of change.

"For a Changing World" places Workday at the center of the organization, making it a single solution for organizational growth. We chose warm colors to stand out amongst a sea of tech-y blues and greens, and developed custom illustrations that represented the diversity of our customers and their experiences.

We also developed specific messaging for every member of the C-Suite, acknowledging their unique challenges and offering targeted solutions. We kept the tone optimistic and humorous to make change seem a little less scary.

To help grow awareness against competitors with bigger budgets, “For a Changing World” was used consistently across all Workday marketing, including CEO keynotes, thought leadership, virtual events, as well as TV, newspapers, magazines, and OOH. We targeted our audience’s passion points by sponsoring F1 in Europe and golf tournaments in the US, while focusing on other sports programming including the Olympics, tennis, and cycling.

Since launching the campaign, we:

1. Slashed the brand awareness gap with Oracle and SAP by nearly half in our two leads markets:

Market vs. Competitor 2020 Awareness Gap 2021 Awareness Gap Decrease

US SAP 8% 4% 50%

Oracle 15% 6% 60%

UK SAP 16% 8% 50%

Oracle 23% 15% 35%

2. Went from third place to first place on brand perceptions like “innovative”, “helps future proof my business”, and “anticipates the latest technological advancement”.

3. Generated 75-125% lift on key brand metrics when comparing those who have seen our ads vs. those who have not:

Market. Perception Unexposed Exposed Increase

US Innovative 18% 34% 89%

Agile 15% 30% 100%

Flexible 18% 32% 78%

UK Innovative 12% 27% 125%

Agile 12% 25% 108%

Flexible 13% 27% 108%

Source: Workday Brand Health Tracker, June 2021

4) Generated 63.5% lift in traffic to the Workday global sites.

Source: Workday, April 2022