Why did andersen consulting change to accenture

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Previous Next. Download Press Release. Subject Tags Accenture Corporate. All Rights Reserved. You must be logged in to view this item. A name change had been forced upon the company, but there were other good reasons for a change of identity. And then there was the general perception of an overly hierarchical, lumbering dinosaur. The process that followed - entitled, suitably self-consciously, BrandStorming, drew on Landor's expertise but also on the hunches of Andersen's own employees.

Ultimately, despite the millions spent on high-powered consultants, it was a name thought up by Oslo Andersen partner Kim Petersen that was chosen. This is another key doctrine for those employing management consultants: always ignore their findings.

The other 2, names suggested from Andersen's 65, staff are officially confidential, but a few have leaked. Already, the result is being mocked within the industry, and the company being referred to as "Ace Ventura" after Jim Carrey's bungling movie pet detective.

In short, critics imply, the name is a superficially authoritative sounding word masking dark caverns of mindboggling meaninglessness ironically, some might say, making it the perfect expression of the management consultant's craft. After the flash of inspiration comes the grunt-work: the long, expensive, technical quest to ensure that the name is not already trademarked and that a suitable internet address is still available.

But most crucial is checking that the new name doesn't mean some thing obscene in a foreign language. Naming consultants have an urban folklore all their own, full of the classic mistranslation nightmares that haunt their sleep: the Nova car, meaning "doesn't go" in Spanish markets; likewise the Pinto, found to refer to tiny male genitals in Brazilian slang; and the cola slogan "Come Alive With Pepsi!

Not a decade ago, the amount of money and effort spent on rebranding would have been unanimously dismissed as the most self-indulgent navel-gazing, and it's not hard to find even senior management consultants who still think it is. But this is the age of the brand: from breathless boosters such as the management guru Tom Peters to the anticorporate writer Naomi Klein, a consensus is emerging that it is brands, not commodities, that are the real centres of economic value.