Making KPMG famous for customer insights

KPMG wanted to become ‘famous for customer’.

Owning this market space was a key component of KPMG’s plan to establish itself as a thought-leading business consultancy. But, realising this ambition would require an integrated campaign tailor-made to raise awareness, build credibility and command media coverage.

Simply providing insights about category management or the best routes to market wasn’t enough. Instead, KPMG wanted to show how changing consumer behaviour is disrupting business models and to provide companies with a new way of thinking about their customers.

To achieve this, we had to translate KPMG’s exhaustive research into accessible formats that engaged key target audiences, from global media titles to Fortune 500 CEOs.

With a global survey of 10,000 consumers, a wealth of ethnographic interviews, historical case studies and more to wade through – crafting a compelling narrative that tied everything together was no mean feat.

To help KPMG’s innovation lab showcase its findings, we created detailed audience profiles, ran narrative workshops and audited the wider content landscape to uncover untapped content themes and opportunities.

Using our proprietary framework, we also developed a comprehensive style guide and a clear messaging framework to help KPMG build its content brand.

This groundwork culminated in a template for success built around a 96-page research report entitled Me, my life, my wallet, with an entire solar system of satellite content including digital content, animated data visualisations and a video exploring the report’s core thesis.

“Raconteur came on board at the very beginning,” says KPMG’s global customer insights programme director. “They were true partners in that core sense of the word.”

“There was a lot of collaboration,” she adds. “Particularly the mission statement, so to speak, and how we wanted it to look and feel and sound.”

With the editorial agenda set, we worked closely with KPMG to shape the research and ensure it would deliver rich stories that established the consultancy’s credibility and drove media coverage. We also interviewed key industry thought leaders to ensure our writers had everything they needed to tell bold stories that would grab a Fortune 500 CEO’s attention.

It was then down to our editorial and design teams to bring everything together with our signature combination of industry-leading content, infographics and visual storytelling.

Ahead of the report’s launch in September 2017, we worked with KPMG’s marketing teams to develop a distribution strategy that galvanised internal stakeholders and engaged external target audiences.

We also delivered high-profile distribution opportunities to build awareness of KPMG’s findings among its target audiences. This included a two-page opinion piece in Raconteur’s Future Customer special report, published in The Times in November 2017.

Me, my life, my wallet generated invitations from numerous Fortune 500 company leaders for KPMG to present its research and collaborate on customer programmes.

“What it’s allowed people to do is to have conversations with their clients that they couldn’t have had before,” KPMG’s global customer insights programme director says. “We’ve been tracking success on dollar values [and] we’ve had a lot of wins that have come out of it.”

The report received extensive coverage in global media titles including Forbes, Financial Express and The Independent. What’s more, KPMG’s inclusion in Raconteur’s Future Customer report elevated the company’s research to a potential audience of 422,000 company purchase decision-makers.

The consultancy was so pleased with the results, it commissioned us to build on this foundation and deliver an even more extensive content marketing campaign in 2018 and beyond.