Building Brand Awareness—and Revenue to Boot

What can you do to grow your business when only a handful of potential clients have heard of your company? That was the challenge that Grant Thornton LLP faced earlier in this decade.
Find out how the company turned things around when Ed Russ keynotes BMA’s MarketingMasters Luncheon Seminar on Wednesday, April 8, at The Standard Club.
Russ is the chief marketing and sales officer at Grant Thornton LLP, the U.S. member firm of global giant Grant Thornton International, one of the six global audit, tax and business advisory organizations in the world. Grant Thornton LLP’s 5,500 client-service people audit public and private companies, help clients navigate complex tax regulations and provide consulting services, including organizational strategy, operational and governance improvement, litigation support, restructuring and valuation.
Today, Grant Thornton LLP is the largest member firm in the GT International group of independent companies, and one of the industry’s leaders. But it was a different story when Russ joined the firm in 2001.
“At that time, Grant Thornton LLP was a company that was serving its clients well but whose revenues had been relatively flat for years,” Russ said. “With unaided awareness levels of only 5%, Grant Thornton was one-tenth to one-twentieth the size of its five major competitors, and it was losing market share each year.”
At BMA’s April luncheon, Russ will detail the brand-building marketing strategies he used to tackle these challenges, including focusing efforts on increasing client satisfaction, generating new business leads and, most importantly, improving that 5% awareness number.
Apparently the strategies have paid off. In 2008 Grant Thornton LLP’s unaided awareness was 39%. Since 2002 the firm has grown at a compound annual rate of 20% and net revenues have increased from $359 million to more than $1 billion.
And its success hasn’t gone unnoticed. Grant Thornton LLP won the Public Accounting Report Annual Audit Ranking for 2008, marking the first time that a non-“Big 4” firm won the annual ranking. For the third consecutive year in 2008, BusinessWeek named Grant Thornton in its “Best Places to Launch a Career.”
The firm was also named to Pink magazine’s “Top Companies for Women” in both 2007 and 2008, and Working Mother magazine named Grant Thornton one of the “100 Best Companies” for the third consecutive year. And for four consecutive years, the Center for Companies That Care named Grant Thornton to its “Companies That Care Honor Roll.”
In addition to explaining the Grant Thornton growth story, Russ’s presentation will focus on tactics that every marketer can use. He’ll provide a strategic overview of the client’s buying cycle and show where “marketing” ends and “sales” begins. He will examine the relative merits of eight b-to-b marketing channels at his and every marketer’s disposal, and he’ll also explain how understanding the buying cycle can help companies orchestrate their marketing programs.
Russ will also show attendees some ads and commercials that Grant Thornton created to address—with a little humor—clients’ selection criteria, based upon the firm’s research findings.

About Edmond Russ
As a partner and chief marketing and sales officer for Grant Thornton LLP, Edmond V. Russ is responsible for strategic marketing, brand building, and managing the marketing and sales resources of the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International.
Since 2001, Grant Thornton LLP has enjoyed a net revenue increase from $359 million to more than $1 billion. Among other accolades, Russ won the CPA Marketing Forum’s “Accounting Marketer of the Year” award in 2005.
Before joining Grant Thornton in 2001, Russ was national director of marketing for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ $400 million middle-market practice. Seven years earlier, he was director of marketing for a global valuation services firm.
Prior to entering the professional services field, Russ served as vice president of marketing for a series of four startup businesses, and he created successful new brands in industrial services, consumer services and b-to-b electronic funds transfer. All four startups were subsequently sold to strategic buyers, and at his last startup, Russ served as interim CEO and raised more than $5 million in venture capital.
When he’s not working, Russ is a high-speed driving instructor and he races a vintage Porsche at Road America.