Accenture Song boosts consumer intelligence with Fiftyfive5 acquisition

As the cost-of-living crisis persists, consumer insights come into laser focus as Accenture Song embeds customer analytics and advisory firm Fiftyfive5 into its offering.

Mark Green, president, Accenture Song ANZ and co-founder The Monkeys (centre) photographed with Mark Sundquist and Karen Phillips, both Partners at Fiftyfive5. Britta Campion / The Australian

As the cost-of-living crisis came into laser focus at the centre of last week’s federal budget, the need for businesses to understand consumer behaviour has never been more pronounced for executives seeking growth in a high-inflation environment.

According to consumer insights company Fiftyfive5’s latest Australia Pulse data, financial confidence among consumers is significantly lower compared with April last year, and Australians are still spending more on necessities, such as groceries, utilities and rent versus a year ago. The survey also revealed that health and wellness retained its importance for consumers, with one in five Australians spending more time on their wellbeing than a year ago.

Economic problems, such as the current inflation-driven cost-of-living crisis are major catalysts for consumer change according to Fiftyfive5 partner Mark Sundquist.

“They are really important forces that drive consumer behaviour,” he said. “These are moments where you do really need to understand your customer and your consumer in the context of your category.”

That desire to better understand customers is driving a wave of investment.

According to market research and consulting firm Ken Research, the global customer analytics market is forecast to reach $US28.7bn ($41bn) by 2026.

Mr Sundquist said the pandemic highlighted how many businesses were not prepared for the rapidly changing behaviour of their customers.

“Not only were they unprepared for it, they had no idea why,” he said.

For decades, companies have relied on customer sentiment tools that he said were too simplistic, like net promoter scores (NPS), which are used by two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies.

“The customer is now in the boardroom. Unfortunately, it’s in the boardroom through single apex metrics. NPS is probably the least customer-centric metric that they could have in the boardroom,” Mr Sundquist said.

“A lot of what we’re doing now is trying to help businesses genuinely understand customers to drive experience outcomes for those customers.”

Acquired by Accenture Song five months ago, Fiftyfive5, is now embedded in the global creative and technology company, matching consumer insights to creative outputs as organisations fight to keep pace with customer shifts.

The company caught Accenture Song’s attention late last year for its consumer intelligence capabilities and strategic nous across services such as brand positioning, pricing and customer experience.

“We were looking at the market. And it was – as all these things are – a case of the best business that we could find,” Accenture Song ANZ president and co-founder of The Monkeys, Mark Green said.

The Fiftyfive5 transaction underscores Accenture Song’s broader strategy to expand the breadth and depth of its capabilities, which includes services such as product innovation, commerce, marketing and sales.

In 2017 Accenture Song acquired Australian creative agency, The Monkeys along with design business Maud. This year, it added a media buying and planning unit to the gamut.

“Song is all organised around the customer and trying to find new ways to drive sustainable growth,” Mr Green said.

“And the starting point for any customer growth strategy is that North Star.

“And to try to land on that, you need to base it on good insights around the customer, category, competition and what’s happening in culture. And Fiftyfive5 is rich in insight across all those spaces.”

Mr Sundquist said that in joining Accenture Song, the business welcomed the opportunity to bring the customer in more in a structured way to not just inform brand strategy, but through creativity.

Accenture Song and Fiftyfive5 share this objective.

The problem he sees in organisational structures is often information in silos – but that bringing it together through its analytics and research makes clients’ “eyes light up”, he said.

Karen Phillips, partner at Fiftyfive5 said: “That’s where you can bring it down to what makes our collective and the team’s eyes light up as well. We have always been very good at strategic problem solving, and working with the CMO to identify what the issue is and work out how to solve it, but that’s where we stopped.

“In Song world, we have the ability to go with that work so much further. And the excitement here is really powerful around that.”

So what exactly does bringing a greater understanding of the customer look like in a “Song world”?

“Song has the ability to influence marketing, product and service experience and the broader communications of an organisation,” Mr Green said.

“They’re the biggest dimensions that organisations are using to monitor customers. But there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s about execution and delivery.

“Organisations today are often so complex. They’re sitting on technology and legacy systems that actually make the conversation with the customer really difficult.

“Whether that’s buying a ticket with an airline or selling a refrigerator online, there’s complexity to it that really needs to be taken out of the equation. We’re solving for the strategic opportunity, but then also trying to deliver the answers through what Song can do across its capabilities.”

For Mr Green, this links directly to creativity, which he has long championed as a quality that can affect many facets of businesses.

“By creativity we’re talking more than an ad campaign,” he said. “We’re talking about problem solving, we’re talking about how creativity is employed in all customer experiences,” he said, referring to mobile apps, websites, contact centres, e-commerce and content management systems.

“I think that’s where we can actually start to bring creativity and growth together, because we can do more stuff that actually touches the customer.”

Of the acquisition, he said: “That’s why this feels good. Because that framework for strategically led customer transformation is really important.”