Prudential Insurance Also Selected to Receive Society's Merit Award

The Arthur W. Page Society has selected Accenture as its National award winner for the company's innovative communications program related to its corporate rebranding.

Accenture becomes the 12th company to win the Arthur W. Page Society National Award, which honors outstanding examples of the use of the Page Principles, the Society's unique code of ethics, in dealing with the substantive challenge to an organization.

In selecting Accenture, the Arthur W. Page Society cited the company for 'an unprecedented reinvention of the company.' The challenge for Accenture, previously known as Andersen Consulting, was to restructure and reposition itself after winning its independence from Andersen Worldwide. In addition to renaming the company, this entailed evolving from a private global partnership to a corporation and public company.

Mounting one of the most aggressive communications efforts ever undertaken, Accenture developed and launched an integrated marketing and communications program to rebrand the entire organization across more than 110 offices in 47 countries. The effort ' which included everything from communicating with 20,000 client executives, printing 6.5 million new business cards, and making changes to hundreds of internal servers and 75,000 computer desktops and application, among other things ' was completed within 150 days, an incredibly short timeframe for a program of this scale.

In one year, Accenture was able to reclaim, and in some countries, exceed the brand equity of Andersen Consulting; a brand built over 10 years. According to Interbrand, Accenture's brand equity is currently valued at $5.6 billion, making the company one of the top 50 brands in the world.

The Merit Award winner, Prudential Insurance Company of America, was selected for the communications program that supported the company's decision to change its mutual company structure to one that would give the value of the company to its policyholders. The demutualization plan required the company to make an unprecedented effort to inform 11 million policyholders about its intentions, to educate them about the benefits of those intentions and to obtain the highest vote possible in favor of its decision to issue stock.

Prudential's 'Get Out the Vote' campaign produced the largest demutualization vote on record. More than 4 million policyholders cast their votes, four times the number of votes required by law.

Both awards will be presented at the Society's Annual Conference on September 22-24 at The Sagamore in Bolton's Landing, NY.