Man Bites Dog with Korn Ferry

Korn Ferry challenged Man Bites Dog to create a global C-Suite thought leadership campaign to substantiate its new brand positioning as an organisational consultancy offering more than executive search.

Competition for C-Suite attention has never been so acute. The threat of disruptive innovation has elevated technology to the top of the Boardroom agenda, and relegated talent to the bottom. With headlines across the world forecasting that AI will lead to significant job losses, Man Bites Dog’s research showed that business leaders now believe that technology is more valuable than people.

Man Bites Dog used our award-winning 4D thought leadership methodology to synthesise intelligence about the market, the macro environment, conventional thinking and Korn Ferry’s proposition to identify a signature perspective that would challenge the C-Suite’s talent blindspot by highlighting the value of people to organisations.

Man Bites Dog identified an opportunity to challenge the prevailing belief that technology and machine learning will make talent less important by proving that the opposite is true: AI will generate skilled jobs making the right kind of talent more important in the future of work.

We embarked on ambitious, world-first research to map the mismatch between talent supply and demand in 20 major economies at three future milestones: 2020, 2025 and 2030.
Man Bites Dog developed robust data from a combination of economic modelling, opinion research and Korn Ferry’s proprietary insights to forecast the scale, impact, and timing of the “global talent crunch”. We demonstrated that talent should be at the heart of business strategy by revealing a shortage of 85.2 million skilled workers globally by 2030, threatening $8.5 trillion in lost GDP.

In order to generate sustained impact, Man Bites Dog and Korn Ferry developed a 9-month global integrated marcomms campaign driven by a single key message: the talent crunch is coming:

● The Global Talent Crunch mapped the gap between talent supply and demand, revealing a talent gap equivalent to the combined GDP of Germany and Japan by 2030.
● The Salary Surge showcased Korn Ferry’s reward offer, calculating the $2.5 trillion rise in annual payrolls.
● The Talent Shift highlighted leaders’ complacency with just one in ten having a long-term talent plan.

By translating the soft issue of talent into hard business and economic impact, we enabled Korn Ferry to put talent back on the Boardroom agenda as a strategic business issue and exceed its objectives:

● Repositioning: Changing perceptions of Korn Ferry from executive search to broad
organisational consulting.
● Reputation: Positioning Korn Ferry as a global thought leader on talent, generating more than 300 dedicated pieces of top tier national news and business media coverage on the issue of talent, a subject that is rarely considered business critical or headline-worthy.
● Relationships: Creating a powerful hook for Korn Ferry consultants to have profitable conversations with business leaders and political influencers and generating $millions in direct revenue.