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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