Tuesday 10th Jul, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Markets are what you make of them. Henry Ford knew it when he introduced the “any colour so long as it’s black” Model T Ford. Faberge knew it when he produced the first of his brilliant, bejewelled eggs. Big or small, high value or low cost: We get to decide.
For all the work we do in sizing the global consulting market (hint: it’s big), we’re acutely aware that there’s another, hidden market out there (hint: it’s much, much bigger. Where do you find this? First, you question your instincts; second, you re-think your value proposition.
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.
Wednesday 25th Apr, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
All of our research on the consulting industry at the moment points to a slowdown in the rate of growth in consulting. There’s still a lot of investment and activity among clients: 93% say they’re looking to increase productivity and efficiency; 92% are investing in digital transformation. But the proportion of people who say that their expenditure on consulting services will increase in the next year has fallen from 72% last year to 55%.
One of the truisms of consulting is that everyone benefits from a growing market—that a rising tide lifts all boats. But a market that’s growing at a lower rate than in previous years feels much less benign because the change in tempo is usually unevenly distributed—some boats stay still or sink, while others may do better than ever. Whether your consulting firm is a rising boat, or is becalmed, watching other boats around you rise more quickly, now is a good moment to make sure that your strategy is—well—water-tight.
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