Thursday 22nd Nov, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
We’ve written before about the ‘magnetic middle’ effect, in which clients of consulting firms struggle to differentiate between firms based on the quality of their work alone. Very little separates the top-rated firms from the bottom-rated ones, with firms deliberately making acquisitions and investments to ensure they provide the full suite of services their clients need to a high standard. If this is the case, why are we even talking about quality anymore?
Well, looking at how individual firms performed this year versus last in our annual survey of consulting clients* shows that there’s no room for complacency, particularly when it comes to digital transformation. Firms may have ended up scoring very similarly to each other for the overall quality of their work this year, but some have taken great strides forward in digital, while others appear to be moving backwards.
Monday 8th Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Consulting firms have spent millions of dollars in the last few years to associate a specific set of values with their overarching brand. Quality, integrity, expertise, global reach: All the traditionally big ideas in professional services have been linked to one firm or another, or even to all of them. And firms have hoped that, by doing this, they’re having an impact not only on what their clients think but also on how employees and prospective employees see them. In the war for talent, brand is a big gun.
But it’s also a fairly indiscriminate gun. Consulting firms have already found that a firm’s brand doesn’t necessarily help it sell specific services, where messages about quality, integrity, expertise and global reach pale into insignificance when faced with the need for a concrete, “killer” solution that no other firm can boast.
Friday 17th Aug, 2018
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?
Tuesday 14th Aug, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
We’ve talked before on these pages about the merits and limitations of sub-brands. While they may help to raise awareness of new capabilities, they may also underline that the sub-brand isn’t core to what the firm does. Nowhere is that debate more pressing than in a discussion about digital sub-brands. What’s next for those firms with separate digital sub-brands, if digital is becoming fundamental to everything clients do?
It’s tempting to say that digital sub-brands are reaching the end of their shelf life, and should be integrated back into the parent brands of the firms that spawned them. But recent conversations with clients have given me pause for thought.
Referring to two firms with digital sub-brands, one client says: “They’re still a bunch of number crunchers and geeks.” The digital sub-brands haven’t changed his opinions about the parent brands. Another client used the word “stuffy” to describe the culture of another firm—the opposite of the more innovative and digital image the firm’s sub-brand seeks to convey. “They realised that they can’t attract the people they need for digital,” says the CIO of an energy company in Germany, “so they had to open a new ‘digital’ office up the road that felt different.” It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the parent brand’s ability to succeed in the digital world on its own.
Friday 27th Jul, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
If the consulting industry has been really good at one thing, then it’s at taking perfectly decent words and loading them up with so much promise and ambition that they crack under the strain. “Transformation” is teetering dangerously close to the edge of this at the moment: Digital technology offers so much in terms of potential impact on organisations’ top and bottom lines, but clients are increasingly demanding proof, evidence that work is, in fact, being transformed.
Another such word is innovation. As a concept it’s of critical importance to the consulting industry. Our data has repeatedly highlighted not only the extent to which a firm can demonstrate how an innovative approach will determine whether it will be short-listed for work, but also the significant shortfall between the level of innovation clients are looking for and what firms are delivering in practice. One of the most important factors in deciding which firm to use, innovation is also one of the areas where consulting firms perform worst. In fact, there are only three areas in which firms are perceived to be even weaker: price (which we’ll discount for present purposes—we’ve never met a client who didn’t want a reduction in fee rates); responsiveness and flexibility; and speed of delivery. Those latter two are interesting because we think they link to innovation. Most clients we speak to aren’t interested in blue-sky thinking: When they write in the RFP that they’re looking for an innovative approach, they’re really saying that they want a firm that can bring fresh ideas from other industries and/or countries, one that isn’t so hide-bound by process and organisational baggage that it can’t change the way it works to accommodate a client’s unique set of circumstances and deliver tangible improvements more quickly than clients can do by themselves.
Thursday 10th May, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
EY has this week been crowned as the most powerful brand in the UK in a study by Brand Finance. It’s beaten the likes of Rolls Royce, Magnum, and Costa coffee to the top spot, gaining an AAA+ brand rating based on measurements such as marketing investment, financial performance, and “emotional connection”. But, as I’ve taken to pointing out quite a lot recently, I’m not sure how much this helps leaders understand their brand—particularly in multidisciplinary firms like EY. Is it EY’s audit brand that’s strong, or all parts of its business? Do people have more of an “emotional connection” with EY than they do with their cup of Costa coffee? Does it matter?
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.
Monday 18th Dec, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
For several decades, our standard categorisation of consulting services—strategy, operations, technology, etc.,—have reflected clients’ buying habits sufficiently and accurately that it’s made sense for consulting firms to organise themselves in the same way. Not only do we have “strategy firms”, “operational firms”, but bigger, diverse firms may well have a “strategy practice”, a “technology practice”—and so on. Those delineations have been helpful to both sides: clients have found them a convenient label telling them where to find the expertise they’re looking for; consulting firms have been able to recruit people to specific areas and even pay them differently, depending on the practice they work in.
Thursday 19th Oct, 2017
By Alison Huntington.
After attending an analyst day at Deloitte (admittedly some time ago now) I was asked to fill in a feedback form about the event. I remember writing something along the lines of: “Deloitte did a great job of telling me where it thinks it is positioned, but did less to address the views of many buyers of consulting services.” What I meant by that is that the entire day passed without mention of the firms many regard as its closest competitors—the rest of the Big Four.
Perhaps more than any other firm, Deloitte has pushed the message out to the world that it’s in a category of one: that it’s unparalleled in its breadth of capabilities, its global reach, and its ability to help clients at any—and all—stages of their business issues.
Thursday 4th May, 2017
By Ed Haigh.
Received wisdom says we shouldn’t talk down our competitors. To do so is not only a bit undignified, but is generally reckoned to hold with it the potential for self-harm.
But does trash-talking have an unfairly poor reputation? The question came to mind recently as I was conducting a bit of research into challenger brands, many of whom have made a virtue (and a successful business) of putting down their competitors as often as possible. Indeed, I found plenty of people who were publicly advocating the idea that trash-talking was a good thing.
Tit-for-tat advertising between BMW and Mercedes in the 1980s provides a typically unedifying example of trash-talking, but the one that always comes to my mind occurred in 1999. The British Airways-sponsored London Eye got stuck as it was being lifted into place, prompting Virgin to fly a large banner above the roof of its London headquarters on which it gleefully proclaimed “BA CAN’T GET IT UP”. As far as undignified behaviour goes, telling everyone that your fiercest rival has erectile dysfunction seems hard to beat. But Virgin have got a long way by trash talking its rival, as have many other companies throughout the years. And recently Donald Trump got himself elected President, partly through doing the same thing. Trash-talking might not be nice, but it can certainly be effective.
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