Marketing

By Edward Haigh.

It’s a cold, bright January day, and I’m walking down the Avenue Montaigne in Paris. My meeting has finished early and I’ve got a couple of hours before my next one. Pulling my coat tight around myself against the wind, I realise that I’m hungry—I was up early to get the Eurostar from London and it’s been a long time since breakfast.

Approaching Place de l’Alma I spot a café—Chez Francis—with what looks like a menu on a board outside. I make a beeline for it, my mind already anticipating what might be on offer. A beef bourguignon would go down well on a day like this. Maybe a nice pot-au-feu. Something filling and warming. As I get closer the words on the board come into focus:

1 chef
2 sous-chefs
1 chef pâtissier
25kg of beef
18kg of carrots
50kg of onions
12kg of butter
18 litres of olive oil
75 bottles of burgundy
35 tables
120 chairs

I stop. That wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Does anyone who designs consulting firms’ websites and/or writes the content for them actually think about clients?

I was on a conference call with a firm a couple of years ago. It was a particularly difficult situation as we’d been asked by the senior partner to look at how effectively the firm was marketing itself, and this call was to explain and defend our findings to the marketing team. Some of what we had to say was positive, but at the heart of their efforts was a shiny new website that was difficult to navigate, appallingly badly written, and almost certainly guaranteed to put off all but their most loyal clients (who probably wouldn’t be looking at the website anyway). As people started to argue, I played what I guessed would be our trump card: “What kind of client input did you get?”, I asked innocently.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

My husband, a mild-mannered but physically imposing man, once ripped up an IKEA catalogue in front of the store’s checkout assistant.

To be fair, we’d been waiting in the queue for two hours, having inadvertently visited the store on a morning when it started a major sale, but in our defence I’d plead that only a small number of the checkouts were manned, and that it was a long time since we’d had breakfast. We’d done the usual things—eyeing up the shelves of lingonberry jam, discussing whether that pot plant was just what was needed for the study, wondering why Swedish is the language it is. But two hours was still two hours, and by the time we started to load our heavy boxes on to a conveyor belt clearly designed for professional weightlifters, my husband had clearly had enough. “There’s no way we’re ever going to shop in Ikea again*,” he said, letting rip literally and figuratively.

You’re probably thinking that this doesn’t have much to do with consultants. Premium consulting, all expensive suits and business travel, seems a world away from cheerful flat packs, but pause for a moment.