Situation

• What PwC stands for was unclear in the minds of clients, prospects, and society. Our matrixed structure resulted in competing messages in market.

• There was a need to reshape brand perception, emphasizing PwC’s capabilities extend beyond traditional audit and tax heritage.

• Among our competitors, “Big 4” consultancies and technology companies, PwC was seen as undifferentiated. We wanted to be better known for our range of services including business transformation and ESG and for delivering our core values of solving important problems and building trust in society.

Brief:

• Change the conversation to reflect how we help global businesses navigate challenges and opportunities.

Objectives:

• Increase visibility and engagement with targeted economic buyers, stakeholders, and current and future PwC employees

• Increase awareness and consideration of the services for which we are not normally known

• Deliver an exciting ad campaign that shifts perception of PwC

68% of society expects the C-suite to fix societal problems such as climate change, fractured geopolitics, social tensions, and COVID-19*. Leaders must build trust and deliver sustained, positive change in these areas but don’t know how. This new reality—combined with thousands of conversations with our clients, people, societal leaders, and outside advisors about what’s needed to address the forces shaping our world—informed The New Equation.

This strategy produced the idea that PwC is a community of solvers working together in unexpected ways to solve the world’s most important problems where the future is both human-led and tech powered. The creative showed how diverse teams from inside and outside PwC, come together to spark unconventional ideas and solve the tough challenges – What happens when you partner an auditor with a solar farm engineer with a specialist in AI? It all adds up to The New Equation.

*The Endelman Trust Barometer

While PwC’s client base is comprised of decision-makers, executives and C-suite members of leading corporations, The New Equation also speaks to our most important asset—our people, and recruits interested in joining our community of solvers. But we were also speaking to regulators, policy-makers, the media, our clients’ customers and society at large.

We created a campaign that stretched across this community—determining which media partners best reached our external audience, developing a social media strategy to help our people share our vision, building internal forums to inform our people and creating a unified message to share with potential hires.

Our multi-channel, global campaign targeted our core audience of 22.1M senior decision makers with additional targeting for our top 200 accounts. Our strategy was to own spaces, moments and conversations that solidify PwC’s leadership position. It was a three-pronged approach: go big (grab attention), entice (drive interest) and engage (build a community).

We launched the campaign in a series of waves from June 15, 2021 through December 2021. With participation from all 156 PwC territories, we explained the new strategy to our 330,000+ employees, created a large-scale stakeholder engagement program that included outreach to regulators, policymakers, clients and industry analysts to get them excited about our new message. Additionally, we worked with a number of top-tier reporters to drive tailored stories around the “new” message.

With paid media, we focused on raising awareness and building familiarity of The New Equation with a multi-channel approach. We executed programs with global outlets including Sky News, Australian Financial Review, The Globe and Mail, Le Monde, Nikkei Business, Bloomberg, Wired and Blavity; and prominent streaming, podcast and social platforms.

We created a new microsite including a 90-second anthem video plus key insights and capabilities around top business issues, such as ESG, trust, and digital transformation.

In the short-term, we’ve seen tremendous results. The New Equation is PwC’s most successful global campaign to date with record website traffic, above average engagement and unprecedented brand visibility.

• Increased engagement with economic buyers, stakeholders and employees

• “Trending news” on LinkedIn

• 99% of top 200 global accounts engaged with LinkedIn posts

• #1 Share of Voice on LinkedIn among peer set

• 9K+ social shares from PwC staff

• 2.2M website visits (723% increase vs PwC average)

• More earned media coverage during launch week than in a typical year with articles from Bloomberg, The Guardian, The Indian Express, Business Standard, Arabian Business, CNN, Fortune and Financial Times

Long-term, our consistent approach and network-wide adoption of The New Equation is building awareness and changing brand perception. Already we’ve seen a 10-point improvement in PwC’s net promoter score and preliminary results of brand lift studies are positive.