Client behaviour

By Alison Huntington

I keep a close watch on the price of oil

Lest my consulting practice goes off the boil

I must admit, I felt worried for a time

But things are fine, I walk the line

…is not what Johnny Cash sang, but does neatly sum up consulting to the energy sector over the last year or so.

By Alison Huntington

If you bought a shirt from Primark, you wouldn’t be too annoyed if a button fell off or a seam frayed. After all, shirts from Primark cost about €5.

On the other hand if you bought a shirt from Tom Ford (a brand for which a single shirt tends to be priced between €500 and €1,000) then you’d be pretty unimpressed with broken buttons and frayed seams. You’d expect a perfect shirt, you’d expect to look fantastic in it, and you may even expect random (and, obviously, very attractive) strangers to walk up to you in the street and tell you as much.

By Fiona Czerniawska 26%. That’s the proportion of clients in the energy and resources sector globally who think that strategy firms deliver poor-quality work, twice the level of clients on average, and three or four times as many who say this about Big Four or technology firms. Indeed, attitudes about technology firms move in the opposite direction, being more positive in this sector than on average.