Brand

Here at Source we like to entertain ourselves with finding parallels between consulting and other industries. I’ve talked before about the similarities with phrama (R&D a challenge) and the film industry (specialisation a must), but until I spoke to Torsten Oltmanns at Roland Berger, it hadn’t occurred to me that we were like the car industry.

Carrying out some research recently, I suddenly realised that each of the Big Four firms have now taken ‘ownership’ (in that special marketers meaning of the word) of one of the major colours. Was this deliberate? Suddenly I’ve got a picture in my mind of the Chief Marketing Officers from each firm sitting round a table, each with a large cuban in one hand and a balloon of Louis Treize in the other. They're eyeing each other nervously. Blue (KPMG) and yellow (Ernst & Young) have already been agreed; red and green remain in play.

We seem to be entering a new stage in the evolution of the preferred supplier list.