Client behaviour

Segmenting the consulting market is a bit like skinning a cat: there are many ways to do it. Size is a useful way of thinking about it: small and medium-sized businesses don’t buy much consulting and, when they do, they buy it from their auditor or from freelance consultants.  Sector is much less reliable as an indicator of difference: at the moment, you can take two banks of a broadly similar profile and find that one is buying a lot of consulting services while the other is buying virtually none.

Could a need for specialism be pushing clients into the arms of academics?

Something has cropped up in a number of conversations with clients recently: the use of academics in place of consultants. It's a bit early to tell just how widespread the trend is (if it is, we'll report on it when we publish our next round of client research in 2013) but it seems worth mentioning because it's consistent with a number of other trends we've been observing for some time.

“What I want lies somewhere between consulting, outsourcing and interim management.