AndWilder Brand Consultancy | London Sussex AndWilder Brand Consultancy | London Sussex
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Korn Ferry Advance

From brand strategy to brand expression

The Project

Leveraging decades of career expertise to develop and articulate a shared vision and brand platform for a new direct to consumer brand.

The Background

Korn Ferry is a global management consulting and executive search firm headquartered in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1969 and as of 2019, operates in 111 offices in 53 countries employing more than 8,000 people worldwide. For nearly 50 years, Korn Ferry has placed someone in a new job every 3 minutes. Leveraging decades of career expertise, Korn Ferry was moving fast in creating a new consumer brand delivering hands-on career guidance for every scenario across the entire career lifecycle.

The Challenge

Our role was to help the Executive Team introduce the Korn Ferry brand to a new audience. To extend the company’s reputation for excellence in B2B consultancy and executive search by creating a new platform for the business professionals themselves, those individuals who aspire to be more, to do more and to get more from their careers.

Our remit, to bring the Board of Korn Ferry Advance together at their HQ in Los Angeles to share brand-led, customer insights, align thinking and clarify and articulate a powerful brand purpose and an inspiring vision of the future, for the organisation’s first venture into the B2C environment.

This, potentially billion-dollar business opportunity, would complement and extend Korn Ferry’s existing B2B reputation enabling Korn Ferry to add value throughout the entire career lifecycle. By providing personal career guidance, face-to-face career coaching and valuable tools, all delivered on-demand in a mobile environment as part of a paid subscription, for the first time ever individuals could take control and actively manage their career progression.

The Solution

In partnership with Korn Ferry’s in-house creative team, we developed a programme based on an initial, fast-track 4-week plan. This included research and analysis, stakeholder workshops and the development of the brand strategy platform. Our approach was both motivational and inspirational, a consultative process designed to bring together a diverse team of people and set of perspectives from different areas of the business.

Involving the in-house, team of executive coaches, we worked towards uncovering valuable customer insights that defined the brand’s unique spirit. During a series of face-to-face senior management workshops, we explored the overarching Korn Ferry brand and its relationship with KF Advance. We looked at the parent brand’s positioning, personality, and tone of online communications, discussing and agreeing which brand elements to embrace and which needed to be added.

We built consensus around a strong Vision and Brand Purpose, supported by an energetic and colourful brand personality, and set off behaviours that encourage a strong sense of being part of the wider community and that clearly showed the start-up to be an important part of the Korn Ferry family.

Moving on to develop a deeper brand activation programme, we created key messaging, a set of customer personas and the look and feel and tone of voice that have provided a consistent global framework and helped shape the brand today.