Tuesday 10th Jul, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Markets are what you make of them. Henry Ford knew it when he introduced the “any colour so long as it’s black” Model T Ford. Faberge knew it when he produced the first of his brilliant, bejewelled eggs. Big or small, high value or low cost: We get to decide.
For all the work we do in sizing the global consulting market (hint: it’s big), we’re acutely aware that there’s another, hidden market out there (hint: it’s much, much bigger. Where do you find this? First, you question your instincts; second, you re-think your value proposition.
Thursday 3rd May, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
For consulting firms marketing is a tricky business.
A perennial challenge is to figure out how to communicate a client experience that is so tied up in the people clients meet. That’s tough enough, but increasingly, marketing departments will need to work out how they add robots, software, and assets into the mix. And as firms vie for a position in the transformation market, communicating how your unique end-to-end, strategy-through-execution approach is different from everyone else’s unique end-to-end, strategy-through-execution approach adds another dimension to the marketing challenge.
Our research uncovers another, quite startling issue: that consulting firms’ marketing is most effective among those that are already heavy users of a firm. In effect, marketing is preaching to the converted.
Wednesday 25th Apr, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
All of our research on the consulting industry at the moment points to a slowdown in the rate of growth in consulting. There’s still a lot of investment and activity among clients: 93% say they’re looking to increase productivity and efficiency; 92% are investing in digital transformation. But the proportion of people who say that their expenditure on consulting services will increase in the next year has fallen from 72% last year to 55%.
One of the truisms of consulting is that everyone benefits from a growing market—that a rising tide lifts all boats. But a market that’s growing at a lower rate than in previous years feels much less benign because the change in tempo is usually unevenly distributed—some boats stay still or sink, while others may do better than ever. Whether your consulting firm is a rising boat, or is becalmed, watching other boats around you rise more quickly, now is a good moment to make sure that your strategy is—well—water-tight.
Wednesday 11th Apr, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
You don’t need me to tell you that digital transformation is big. It’s already a massive market ($44bn by our latest estimates), it’s growing rapidly, and it’s right at the top of the corporate agenda. What’s more, by being multidisciplinary by nature, and requiring a breadth of consulting services to be truly transformational, it’s particularly big news for big firms. Which, if anything, makes it even bigger.
But what does that mean for mid-sized strategy firms? Several barriers to these sort of firms playing in this space spring up, at least in theory: They’re not big enough to have the global reach many clients require; their breadth of services is unlikely to be as wide as the biggest firms; and they may simply not have enough people to deploy, particularly when it comes to turning strategies into action.
Thursday 5th Apr, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
I’m not always a fan of large-scale thought leadership studies, repeated year in, year out, but the title of PwC’s 21st CEO survey caught my imagination—and, I suspect, the Zeitgeist. In The anxious optimist in the corner office, PwC argues that “despite record levels of short-term optimism in the global economy, CEOs worldwide report heightened levels of anxiety regarding the business, economic, and, particularly, the societal threats confronting their organisations.”
Friday 23rd Mar, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
By many metrics in our annual survey of clients’ opinions about consulting firms, IBM Global Business Services is doing extremely well. It’s top-rated for the quality of the work it provides in a range of consulting services, and, as we’ve discussed previously on these pages, manages to turn the heads of clients of firms like McKinsey. Other studies seem to confirm the power of the IBM brand—in a 2017 survey by Interbrand, it was ranked as the tenth “best brand” in the world.*
So can the IBM brand team put their feet up for the rest of the year? Is their work here done? We suspect not: Despite their many successes, there’s evidence that, for the consulting part of their business at least, there’s still some way to go.
Wednesday 21st Mar, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Imagine you’re walking down the supermarket aisle looking for breakfast cereal. Bored with the one you’ve been eating all these years, you’re in the market for a change. You pick up the first one that catches your eye. “MEGAPOPS”, the package shouts in an unnecessarily lurid colour, “THE BEST WAY TO START YOUR DAY WITH A ZING!!!!” You look for the small print, some tentative indicator of what a zing is in this context—but there isn’t any. “SUNNYNUGGETS,” screams the next, “GOLDEN! DELICIOUS! FAST!” But is it healthy? Well, there’s nothing to tell you that. As consumers we wouldn’t—and don’t—put up with this. Decades of regulation and government intervention ensures that we’re in a position to make informed choices about our breakfast cereal. Sure: We can—and many of us do—choose to ignore them. Sure: There are still improvements to be made to the labelling. But on balance, as consumers, we’re the best-informed generation in the history of humanity.
If only that were true for consulting.
Thursday 8th Mar, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
You know the feeling: You’ve seen the dress online, or the fancy watch in a shop window. I’ll look so good in it, you think. It’ll be just perfect to wear to that wedding next month, you think. I’ll get compliments from strangers, you think. Life will be better.
But you try it on and it’s not quite right. It’s too big around the middle, the colour isn’t quite right. The oversized watch face makes your wrist look like an udon noodle. You really want it to be the one for you, but after standing there for a few minutes trying to persuade yourself that it’s right, you reluctantly concede that it isn’t.
Clients of consulting firms describe a similar journey with the consulting firms they encounter.
Wednesday 28th Feb, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Everyone thinks they know everything about pricing in consulting. “Segmenting the consulting industry is very simple,” a senior French consultant once told me, with one of those quintessential gallic shrugs. “There are very expensive firms, less expensive firms, and cheap firms.”
That attitude might have been just about defensible 10 years ago, but it would be difficult to justify today. True, clients’ overall sense of the importance of price, relative to other factors they take into account when deciding which consulting firm to use, hasn’t changed much. In our most recent survey of around 3,000 senior executives in six major consulting markets around the world, 6% said this was the attribute that mattered most, up from 5% in 2017. Last year, price came out as the 9th most important attribute; this year it’s moved up to 8th. Those changes are within the margin for error: What we see in our surveys and hear from clients we speak to, is that price is a qualifier, a guide to whether a firm has understood the scope and scale of a project, and a reassurance that they’re not being ripped off. While there’s clearly a minority of clients to whom price is genuinely critical, most think about price only to be able to put it on one side in order to focus on more important aspects: ‘Innovation and the ability to implement’ top this year’s list.
Tuesday 20th Feb, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Sixty-six million years ago. In the apocalyptical gloom, the world’s last dinosaur is dying. Snout down in the icy mud, its eyes starting to close, the dinosaur glimpses movement: A small animal, whose fur has kept it warm, is scurrying. “I wasn’t expecting that,” thinks the dinosaur as extinction finally closes around it.
The world is full of surprises.
We were interviewing a consulting firm recently that, on the cusp of winning a multi-million-dollar transformation deal, found themselves out manoeuvred by a much smaller firm, against all expectations. “We’d dismissed them,” said the partner we spoke to. “Not only had we never heard of them, but they hadn’t listened to the client’s brief, had questioned the scope of the project, and come back with a proposal that didn’t deal with the key issues.” Just a minor detail, then, that the client loved a genuinely innovative, more challenging approach.
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