Wednesday 5th Dec, 2018
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.
Wednesday 24th Oct, 2018
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.
Tuesday 2nd Oct, 2018
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.
Friday 24th Aug, 2018
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?
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?
Thursday 3rd May, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
For consulting firms marketing is a tricky business.
A perennial challenge is to figure out how to communicate a client experience that is so tied up in the people clients meet. That’s tough enough, but increasingly, marketing departments will need to work out how they add robots, software, and assets into the mix. And as firms vie for a position in the transformation market, communicating how your unique end-to-end, strategy-through-execution approach is different from everyone else’s unique end-to-end, strategy-through-execution approach adds another dimension to the marketing challenge.
Our research uncovers another, quite startling issue: that consulting firms’ marketing is most effective among those that are already heavy users of a firm. In effect, marketing is preaching to the converted.
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.
Monday 5th Sep, 2016
By Edward Haigh.
Want something done? Establish a clear set of objectives, set aside a budget, pull a team of people together, and let them get on with it. Unless, that is, you’re dealing with the marketing department of a consulting firm.
Earlier this year, marketers and their bosses in around 30 consulting firms were kind enough to give us their views on a variety of issues about marketing. It was an important exercise because consulting firms are indeed setting aside very sizeable amounts of money for marketing and pulling together armies of people to spend it. What the results show, though, is that the one thing consulting firms aren’t doing is letting them get on with it.
Thursday 9th Jun, 2016
Consulting projects don’t emerge out of nothing. Unlike the universe, there’s not a vast expanse of emptiness in clients’ minds into which pops—miraculously—the idea for a new project. No: clients’ minds are teeming with life. But much of what’s swimming around is at an early stage of evolution, singled-celled organisms if you like. So what takes an amoeba and turns it into a fully-fledged consulting project, and what role can marketing play in that process?
There are really three evolutionary stages we need to think about.
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