On August 7, 2000 an international arbitrator ruled in favor of Andersen Consulting in its arbitration with Andersen Worldwide and Arthur Andersen. Under the terms of the ruling, Andersen Consulting was given until December 31, 2000 (just 147 days) to adopt a new name and relinquish the Andersen Consulting name. What followed was one of the largest and most successful rebranding campaigns in corporate history (at the time, Andersen Consulting had 70,000 employees in 46 countries with $10 billion in annual revenues).
I was involved in multiple projects within the massive rebranding effort:
Arbitration Communications — I served on the internal communications team reporting on the arbitration process, where I helped write email updates for employees, as well as script answers in real time to employee questions submitted during the firmwide webcast which immediately followed the arbitration decision.
Brandstorming — I oversaw the day-to-day operations of the Lotus Notes-based Brandstorming intranet site through which employees could contribute their suggestions for the company’s new name. The name that ultimately was chosen by the partners — Accenture — was contributed by an employee via that Brandstorming tool.
Rebranding Q&A — I provided content management for the Global Brand Team’s Rebranding Q&A intranet site, which captured questions employees submitted about the rebranding process. I triaged submitted questions and worked with the Global Brand Team to write and post answers to all questions.
Marketing & Communications Intranet Rebranding — I was responsible for locating and coördinating the removal/replacement of all instances of the Andersen name, logo and brand that appeared in Marketing & Communications internal online tools, intranet sites and Lotus Notes databases.
*On January 1, 2001, Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture.
This sample originally was published to portfolio.kevinabarnes.com on August 2, 2010.
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