What you need to know:

• A year after joining Deloitte Digital, former Clemenger-BBDO boss Nick Garrett has been appointed Global Lead for the firm's Marketing and Commerce practice.
• The appointment was pushed through by global CEO Sam Roddick and the exec leadership group.
• Deloitte Digital is banking on creativity and creative thinking to deliver the 'X' factor beyond tech transformation, which is now table stakes.
• Deloitte Digital's Australian unit is leading the global charge for the firm to embed creativity across the group - economists and accountants included.
• Garrett says leading marketers have "removed themselves from marketing execution" and "using marketing as an innovation and growth department. That's still probably the top 10 per cent".  

New tribe, new breed

Exactly a year after joining Deloitte Digital, Nick Garrett has landed a global gig – plucked by Deloitte Digital global boss Sam Roddick and his executive leadership to front the group’s marketing and commerce practice worldwide, helping to embed creativity and brand across the consulting giant’s rapidly expanding digital services business.

The firm is bidding to eclipse rivals such as Accenture Song and keep driving revenue, reportedly $16bn in 2021 and said to be the fastest growing part of Deloitte's broader business, by embedding collective creative firepower within the heart of the world’s biggest companies and go beyond CMO budgets and sphere of influence. The plan is to make “brand a business strategy”, said Garrett, and take creativity upstream.

"Technology is the cornerstone of business transformation. But technology alone isn’t going to be enough to drive differentiation,” Garrett told Mi3. “The more progressive and pioneering businesses want to accelerate past the competition – globally, it’s now a technology and brand conversation.”

Although brand valuations are often a key consideration in merger and acquisition deals, operationalising brand investment and strategy remains a fuzzy business process. But brand and creativity - or unconventional thinking - is climbing the corporate agenda and the world’s biggest companies are buying in, per Garrett, because the world’s biggest consultancies are now driving that narrative. “Brand is everything,” said Garrett. “It’s every point at which a consumer or customer interfaces with the business – and every single touchpoint is a canvas for creativity.”

Agencies hamstrung

A former Clemenger BBDO CEO in New Zealand and Australia before exiting the group, partly over its strategic direction, Garrett spent two decades within creative agencies, where he says many of the smartest people are “business strategists and problem solvers masquerading as agency folks”. 

He realised ten years ago that agencies were hamstrung by the fact that their only access point into businesses is via the marketing department, with little to no opportunity to influence top management. Most of the large communications holding groups have been trying to rebrand as business transformation consultancies in recent years, with mixed results.

Consultancies have no such access limitations nor legacy, and over the last decade have amassed serious firepower within their digital services businesses. Garrett thinks they can persuade a much broader business cohort to apply creative thinking to a much wider range of business problems. Which is why he signed up.

“The canvas to be creative, to paint creativity has just got so much bigger and the best place to express that creativity is upstream, in a consultancy, where you are bringing together the best minds across business strategy, technology and the best subject matter experts, infused with creative and brand thinking,” said Garrett. “It’s formidable, and that is the era we are entering.”

Aussie rules

He will now divide his time between Australia and offshore, pulling together crack teams to drive transformation across some of the world’s biggest companies – and said Australia’s talent pool will be at the heart of many of those projects.

“There is an opportunity to create cross-geo teams so that Australia is playing a really large role – and it should, because our capability is way beyond creative brand and advertising. We’ve got some of the best people in Deloitte Digital [globally] full stop – and we can create those teams and bring more Australian input into some of the big global plays,” said Garrett.

Esan Tabrizi, Head of Deloitte Digital and Customer & Marketing Practice at Deloitte Australia, said Garrett was picked by global boss Sam Roddick and the global executive team to spearhead that push due to his “experience, thinking and strategy nous”, but also because the Australian practice “is probably the most forward on this topic of integrating creativity” across not just digital, but also the wider consulting business.

“We have proven that this is a viable strategy for our business – and that it is a differentiator for us,” said Tabrizi.

“We strongly believe that creativity integrated across all of Deloitte Digital will set us apart from our competitors and more importantly, better solve problems for our clients,” he added. “Armed with Nick’s expertise, his articulation of the challenge … it didn’t require me to push a lot.  It was a conversation with Sam and the executive global leadership team that this is the right answer.”

Garrett said that outcome is testament to the foundations laid by the Australian unit under Tabrizi and his creative partners at Deloitte Digital, Matt Lawson and Adrian Mills, themselves former ad agency network creatives. 

“When you’re getting calls from lead client service partners – immense pieces of business domestically, regionally, globally, and they’re asking for us to be a part of these big, big projects, then something is working. We cannot underestimate how impactful the Australian firm has been and the global reach of the work – and the Australian team has been doing that for some time – it’s clicking.”

Magic formula

Now Garrett plans to “export that magic ­of integration and collaboration” around the world, “building an end-to-end model so that we are going from transformation through brand right out to the far end of the funnel”.

He says the “pioneering marketers” are already grasping the opportunity of brand as business strategy.

“They have been getting back into the boardroom and driving the brand agenda. They have removed themselves from marketing execution and they’re using marketing as an innovation and growth department,” suggests Garrett. “That’s still probably the top 10 per cent. But we would love to be able to help put marketing on a pedestal and be able to supply CMOs with the same strategic technology and firepower that we supply to chief digital officers, chief transformation officers and chief technology officers.

“If we can put creativity back in the boardroom at an exponential level, that is the accelerator for growth and change – and that is a massive opportunity for the industry.”

Creative conversion

But Garrett’s under no illusions that converting the masses to brand and creative thinking – particularly those trained to see technology as the answer to all questions – will be a walk in the park.

“To say it will be easy would be insane, it’s not. If it was easy, someone else would have done it a long time ago. But good people collaborate and collaboration only happens when you can learn something from each other,” said Garrett.

Tabrizi agreed.

“Any effective, smart executive at any of our clients knows that the best outcome is going to be about getting the best out of their people and our people, and bringing people together in a very collaborative environment – and the thread that binds people together is customer centricity. It’s about solving problems for the consumers and customers of the brand.”

Deloitte Digital “gets out of bed for those problems – and those problems alone,” said Tabrizi.

“I’m not saying that projects to replace an ageing ERP system don’t matter. They are incredibly important for an organisation and are really, tough, complex projects. But they are not the type of project that Deloitte Digital goes after and solves,” he added.

“So if you think about the customer as the single binding threat, then the concept of creativity is probably one of the most powerful tools to solve answers, to organise around and bring people together. For me, that is probably the most important part of how we are trying to approach these client challenges – and what I’m very hopeful Nick is going to bring to our team globally,” added Tabrizi.

“That will set us up for success – not just in Australia, but globally – setting the strategy and executing on it to really elevate Deloitte Digital to a segment of one. Having him lead the strategy around creativity and marketing for us globally, it's going to help us materially lift our game against our competitors.”