2 - Making sense of brands

Summary

The Deloitte brand

Usually, when I meet David Redhill over breakfast at Bondi Beach, he is just coming back from an early-morning surf. I am not sure how many senior partners of global accounting firms surf, but David seems to be an exception in many ways. It starts with his rather eclectic background: he was born in Singapore, has Russian ancestors, worked in London, Barcelona, San Francisco and New York, and now lives in Sydney, near the beach. His career is no less colourful: he was Global Head of Marketing for Landor before joining Deloitte. Landor is one of the leading global brand strategy and design consultancies. Its client list reads like a who's who of the business world, and includes Accenture, BP, Procter & Gamble, FedEx, Microsoft, Pfizer, HP among many others.

David is Chief Marketing Officer at Deloitte and a key member of a multinational team developing the Deloitte brand on a global level. For him, the move from FMCG to knowledge-intensive firms is the best thing that ever happened. ‘It is more exciting to sell ideas than dog food,’ he says. Knowledge-intensive firms such as Deloitte increasingely engage in branding, which makes it a very dynamic and challenging field: as David puts it, auditors are designed to take things apart, and being creatures of habit, this is what they do with brands and branding practices too.