PwC has unveiled a new brand positioning, including an updated visual and verbal identity to “modernise” its image and better reflect its growing focus on technology and AI.
The refresh is part of its new global platform, ‘Catalyst for Momentum’, and includes a simplified logo featuring an orange “momentum mark” – an upward, forward design inspired by the ‘W’ in PwC.
This update signals the firm’s ambition to align more closely with its evolving market position, especially as it invests in new technologies and recruits a more diverse range of talent and expertise to make it “relevant for today’s buyers”.
“We’ve got a very well-known, very well-trusted brand across the world, but we wanted to be able to extend the reach of it into today’s market,” PwC’s CMO Antonia Wade tells Marketing Week.
Wade explains that while PwC has high brand recognition, the business felt its previous visual identity looked “dated” when placed alongside some of its tech partners.
“We had a lot of colours in our system. We felt like we were sometimes a bit confused and confusing in the market,” she says.
“We haven’t done anything with our visual system for quite a long time, and when we do alliances, for example, with Google or Microsoft, it doesn’t feel as vibrant and as modern.”
The hope is the updated logo will signify a more “modern and revitalised PwC”.
We really wanted to create our version of ‘Just Do It’.
Antonia Wade, PwC
However, it’s a balance between modernising the brand while staying true to what clients already know and trust. Wade says the goal is to “signal change” without making it feel like a completely new PwC and risking a “credibility gap”.
“We didn’t think of it as a refresh. We thought about it more as a revitalisation,” she says. “It was quite an interesting challenge for us as marketers and brand people to think about how we show and signal that we are a different type of PwC, without losing some of those things that have made us successful in the past.”
The new identity will roll out internally across all materials and channels, and externally through a major advertising campaign launching this week in the US and globally from next week.
Titled ‘So You Can’, the campaign aims to position PwC as a partner that gives clients the “catalytic confidence” to start, sustain or accelerate progress.
“The advertising was an interesting challenge, because we are a highly global company and we really wanted to create our version of ‘Just Do It’,” Wade says. “Of course, we’ll never be Nike, but it’s something that was simple, easy to understand, and that countries all around the world could get behind.”
The campaign features a multichannel approach including out-of-home (OOH) placements in major airports and transport hubs, digital and print media in key global markets, and AI-driven activations on connected TV aimed at targeting large clients and senior executives.
“We’ve got deals with the types of titles that appeal to the C-suite,” she explains.
Wade expects the campaign to run in waves over the next 14 to 18 months, with the goal of evolving and remaining relevant for “many years”. She says the new visual identity is designed to stand out from competitors.
The key metric PwC is tracking following the refresh is consideration, particularly in newer service areas like data and tech.
“In professional services, if you’re not considered, then you can’t win and deals can take quite a long time to incubate,” she explains.
Once in a decade
PwC last rebranded in 2010, when it formally shortened its brand name from PricewaterhouseCoopers to PwC, but it hasn’t revisited it again until now.
When Wade joined the company in July 2021, she noted people “hadn’t paid attention to the brand for some time”.
“It felt like it was time for us to start looking at it,” she explains.
The process began around 18 months ago with an extensive global survey, aimed at understanding client buying behaviours across services and what mattered most to both current and future employees. However, leadership changes last year meant pausing and restarting the process until the changes were made.
“We had a lot of different factors that we needed to take into consideration, and a lot of people that we needed to take on the journey,” she adds.
Following the research, one major insight was that technology-driven purchases are becoming more complex, involving larger groups of decision-makers, particularly tech executives.
“These buying circles get bigger and bigger, and the role of the technology executive in the organisation is becoming more and more prevalent,” she adds. “We felt like perhaps we could do a better job of articulating where we had strengths, and how we could appeal to that broader set of buyers.”
As PwC considered how to evolve its brand platform, input from clients and analysts reinforced the idea that the firm’s value lies in enabling momentum – helping businesses move forward.
“Clients told us: ‘We as clients are the ones that need to drive momentum in our business, but what you do is you come in and you enable that’,” she notes.
As part of its new positioning, PwC has also redefined its brand “personality traits” to be collaborative, bold and optimistic – a deliberate shift to match the confidence it wants to project externally.
“When I look at the stories that we tell in PwC about the brilliant work we do, and then I look at our external position, we are not always as bold and certain as we should be,” she says. “It’s a rallying cry for us to be more confident about what we do in the market.”
With over 370,000 employees worldwide, PwC is using AI to ensure brand consistency at scale. The firm has integrated its new brand guidelines directly into internal AI tools, making it easier for teams to produce on-brand content automatically.
“AI is embedded to help people stay on brand, which will help people to be creative, but within guidance. The AI being embedded into our technology and tools allows people to do the right thing, which is what everyone wants to do.”
