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.
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