Deloitte launches new partnership with The Explainers to create narrative strategy offering

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Deloitte is continuing to expand the frontier of professional services and strengthen its creative digital consultancy practice by today joining forces with The Explainers, a digital communication studio that helps clients inform, engage and persuade more effectively through business storytelling.

The Explainers use animation, film, installation, infographics, written stories, graphic novels and other media to help clients better explain what they do. The studio has quickly built a reputation for innovative and engaging storytelling that facilitates large scale organisational change initiatives.

Says Cindy Hook, CEO, Deloitte: “We are experiencing significant demand for our advisory services and will continue to invest in adjacent capabilities that enable our clients to effectively manage complex change. The Explainers are leaders in creating compelling stories that explain complex ideas.  They very much complement our design thinking approach to problem solving and as part of our Customer practice will help our clients connect with their customers in ever more engaging ways.”

The Explainers will form a new narrative strategy operating unit within Deloitte Consulting’s Customer practice and will have strong links to Deloitte Digital. Matt Taylor, owner and founder of The Explainers, will become a director with Deloitte in Sydney and bring his team of eight digital storytellers with him.  He will lead the narrative strategy team.

Says Frank Farrall, lead partner for Deloitte Digital Asia Pacific and the Customer Practice in Australia: “We are thrilled to have The Explainers join our team.  Since we acquired MashUp in August last year, our Customer Practice has gone from strength-to-strength, as clients recognise the value of working with a single provider to manage all aspects of improving their customers’ experience.  Our brand and spatial team has doubled in size in the past 12 months and we have just hired a new Melbourne partner to further build our retail offering.  As evidenced by Deloitte Digital’s acquisition of creative agency Heat back in February, we see huge opportunity in increasingly providing our clients with creative content as well as strategic business advice.”

Says Shane Currey, consulting partner and national design lead for Deloitte, who the Narrative Strategy team will report to: “Deloitte is increasingly able to offer clients an integrated suite of services to enable all aspects of large scale transformations and with The Explainers effective storytelling is now a key part of that service offering.  If you are spending millions of dollars on a technology transformation project, you don’t want it to fail because you didn’t effectively explain why you are doing it.  The Deloitte Narrative Strategy team can help any organisation grappling with change explain the ‘why’ in an immersive, compelling way.”

Says Taylor: “Major change has become the new constant for modern business, so explaining any kind of change after it happens is often too late. Today, being successful requires communicating and explaining change as it happens, which is what The Explainers is all about. Through persuasive storytelling, we’ve helped large organisations and the government solve a broad range of operational and business problems. Combining our narrative skills and strategic experience with the power of the Deloitte network opens us up to a vast knowledge base and new relationships, which is incredibly exciting for us.”

The Explainers’ clients include the DIIS, Westpac, IAG, AMP, NBN, and the Human Rights Commission. The Narrative Strategy team will continue to work with government, innovation and financial services clients.

The team will also remain closely involved in the Sydney marketing and design community and events such as Vivid Ideas, AGDA and the Good Design Awards.

The Explainers move builds on a series of recent technology and marketing-related transactions and alliances Deloitte has achieved in recent years, including teams from:

– SixTree (integrating legacy and emerging technology platforms)

– Cloud Solutions Group (changing the way cloud infrastructure advisory services are delivered)

– MashUp (spatial design and blending the physical and digital customer experience)

– Dataweave (Oracle implementation services, identity management and cloud solution delivery)

– Digivizer (providing real-time social analytics to strategic business consulting).