Marketing

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.

By Rachel Ainsworth.

I bought a new house recently, and the process of having it refurbished has made me a perfect target for cross-selling. The hard floors in the hallway? Fitted by the same firm that provided the carpets in the lounge. The tiling in the bathrooms? Provided by the same guy who carefully fitted new doors throughout. Our new oven? Bought from our go-to department store.

Could I have sourced what I needed more cheaply? No doubt. Would the end result have been as good? I don’t know. For all the decisions above, and many more, it was easy to go with the tried-and-tested option, with people I’d already had a good experience working with. And consulting projects are no different.

However, in making the decision to cross-buy, I did need to know that this other product or service was on offer, and I did need to be confident that the firm was as proficient in this new area as it was in the area of my original purchase. Buyers of consulting services are no different. And most of them are influenced by thought leadership.¹ Could your firm be doing more with thought leadership to let previous buyers know what else you have on offer, and to convince them of your expertise in this as yet untested area?

By Edward Haigh.

A colleague of mine said something that shook me to my marketing core the other day.

We were talking about the bike ride from London to the Loire Valley that a few people from Source will be undertaking in September and for which she, along with another colleague, will be driving the support vehicle. Bemoaning the fact she had to spend a weekend in the proximity of men wearing lycra (a prospect apparently not sufficiently offset by the chance to spend the weekend in northern France eating cheese) she consoled herself by saying: “At least I get to drive your Land Rover and don’t have to drive some crappy Skoda or something."

Kadunk.

Some crappy Skoda? Let’s get a few things on the table at this point: My colleague was born in 1990. One year later, Skoda, which had hitherto been owned by the Czechoslovakian state and had the sort of reputation you might expect from a publicly owned car maker from Eastern Europe, began a process that would take it towards privatisation. In 2000 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, which had the sort of reputation that German car makers have. Which, putting recent scandals delicately to one side for the moment, is somewhere up there with Michaelangelo’s reputation for decorating ceilings, or Einstein’s reputation for having an idea. It’s what us Brits would call “rather good”.

At this point in Skoda’s history, my colleague was 10. Like most of her generation, I don’t believe that she has anything other than a passing interest in cars today, so it seems a reasonable bet that she couldn’t have cared less about them when she was 10. In other words her exposure to Skoda’s poor reputation would have been fairly limited.

In the years that followed, Skoda embarked on a campaign designed to make everyone realise that by buying a Skoda they were basically buying a VW for less money. And, by and large, the car-buying public seem to have bought into that. But if, 18 years later, my colleague still thinks of Skodas as “crappy” then my guess is that she’s far from alone. After all, they haven’t been crappy for at least two-thirds of her life.

As a marketer it’s a fairly depressing thought that 18 years of advertising to someone who’s still only 27 isn’t enough to change perceptions of a brand. But neither is it completely unfamiliar. The current iterations of the advisory businesses of EY, KPMG, and PwC have been going for only slightly less time than Skoda has been making good cars, and Deloitte’s has been going for longer. But we still regularly hear clients say that they’re “just a bunch of accountants”. No, they’re not! They’re a whole lot else besides. What on earth do these firms have to do differently to change people’s minds?