Fujitsu Services: Redefining Its Reputation

In 2004, Fujitsu Services, one of Europes leading information technology (IT) services companies, faced a maturing market and increasing competition. After being rebranded from ICL to Fujitsu Services in 2002, the Fujitsu brand as an IT services provider was relatively unrecognized outside Japan. The company knew that it needed to do something drastic marketing-wise, and it looked to Philip Oliver, newly appointed acting CMO, to develop a new approach.

Oliver’s initial analysis revealed a strong company with unique assets, yet one that suffered from an identity crisis. In conjunction with Fujitsu Services’ CEO, Oliver launched a major brand and differentiation initiative that is notable for a number of reasons:

• Emphasis on reputation, not brand
• Experience-based differentiation
• Attention to the internal audience

Reputation vs. Brand

Almost at once, Oliver noticed that bringing up the subject of branding at senior management meetings was sure to quell any passion in the room and cause the senior management team’s eyes to glaze over. According to Oliver, “When you talk about brand to senior executives, they think brands are about consumer product. B2B executives are not interested, because they do big deals with big clients. But if you call it reputation, suddenly you have their attention. ” Senior managers understand the value of a good reputation and especially how difficult it is to do business when you have a bad one.

According to Oliver, the difference between brand and reputation is subtle but important:

• Brand is communicated through a company’s traditional marketing communications activities: identity, collateral, events, direct marketing, analysts and press relations, and so forth.
• Reputation, meanwhile, is established via services delivery and client and employee experiences.

By equating reputation to the successful closing of business, Oliver captured the CEO’s and management team’s attention. A good reputation speeds up the sales process. Services sales typically take longer than product purchases; therefore, anything a company can do to speed the sales cycle is going to be welcomed.

Experience-Based Differentiation

With the help of an agency that well understood the nuances of B2B services, Fujitsu Services reached out to its clients and prospects as well as its senior executives. The company asked CEOs, CIOs, and other executives throughout Europe for their opinions, and the executives were not shy. Through these conversations Fujitsu Services learned how the market perceived the company as well as the executives’ honest views of the IT industry overall.

The research was critical to establishing components of Fujitsu Services’ reputation model and ensuring its relevance to client priorities. The research revealed that clients perceive a history of IT solutions providers over-promising and under-delivering. They are very cynical. Nobody believes the advertising claims. At the same time, Fujitsu Services was viewed as largely pragmatic, honest, and delivering as promised. This begat the notion of “realism” that has since become the essence of the Fujitsu Services brand.

After multiple iterations of internal and external discussions, research, tuning, simplification, and testing, Fujitsu produced a list of five genuine differentiators, with realism at the core (Figure 1).

Figure 1

The differentiators have little to do with technology. Rather, they relate to the client experience—what makes the company different in the eyes of its customers.

Attention to the Internal Audience

For the rollout of its reputation management program, Fujitsu Services is placing a huge emphasis on internal audiences. The marketing and human resources organizations have collaborated to develop a long-term interactive program. Over the course of two years, every employee will have eight quarterly touches of the reputation program. This does not mean listening passively to eight presentations; rather, it involves eight interactive, participative small group sessions.

Although Fujitsu Services’ objective is to get all employees to internalize the defining brand attributes, the company is not looking to “turn out clones.” Oliver explains, “We hire good, bright people. Good, bright people have brains! They like to work things out for themselves … What straight talking means to a guy who fixes ATMs is different from a consultant working with a CEO as part of a large business process outsourcing deal. ”

In addition, the company has enlisted 120 employees to serve as reputation program champions. Having the right number of champions in each business unit has turned out to be a critical success factor. The champions know how their business units work, and they know how to tailor the engagement session materials for greatest impact.

Gauging Success

Thus far, the vast majority of Fujitsu Services’ people are engaged in the program across Europe. However, success for a reputation program is not measured by how many employees can speak the “gospel,” but by actual employee behavior and the “uptake” among clients and industry influencers.

Recent customer surveys show a consistent improvement in customer satisfaction. Further, customers are starting to describe the company as honest and straightforward. And although it is not yet uniformly consistent, the research shows that individual employees are changing their perceptions and behaviors. Perhaps one of the most telling signs is that the company is starting to attract people from its competitors—people who “18 months ago would never have considered working for us.”

By embedding the principles of the reputation model in every aspect of the way the company does business, Fujitsu Services has gone well beyond “this year’s marketing campaign” to a program with staying power.

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