Client behaviour

By Alison Huntington.

Youngme Moon’s book, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, came to mind when writing up our most recent research into clients’ perceptions of leading consulting firms in the US. In it, Moon makes the case that in trying to differentiate in so many ways—adding product here, bolting on something else there—companies have actually ended up doing the opposite. Instead of coming up with something truly different, they follow what others have done, and ultimately, end up looking more and more like the rest of the competition. 

I think we’re seeing something similar in the US consulting market. Every year, we ask senior end-users of consulting to tell us about three firms that they either work with or know by reputation, asking them to rate firms for the quality of their work. What’s striking this year is just how little perceptions vary from firm to firm.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

One of the unexpected results of our recent research into client perceptions in the US consulting market was was how well HR firms appear to be doing in the digital transformation space.

Let’s take Korn Ferry as an example: more than 90% of US clients who’d worked with the firm (as opposed to those who know it based on reputation) had positive things to say about the quality of its work in this area. The issue, though, is that there aren’t many of these people, certainly far fewer than would rate the digital transformation services of IBM, PwC, or even McKinsey, for example. On sheer numbers, it’s possible to argue that this is a bit of a blip—yet we see other HR firms doing comparatively well. So what’s going on?

By Fiona Czerniawska.

I’m not generally prone to nostalgia, but trying to analyse trends in the consulting industry is sometimes enough to make me yearn after a quieter life.  

Forecasting demand trends used to be very simple. Back in the heady 1990s, it was just a question of how big you thought the growth figure should be. You could, for example, assume that all banks would behave in the same way. Want to know the size of the consulting market there? Easy: 3% of costs across the board. Want to know what it would be the next year? No problem: take the last five year’s growth and draw a straight line. The global financial crisis came as fairly rude wake-up call to all that, but at least the consulting world could comfort itself that, if they got it wrong, then so did just about every major financial institution and government on the planet. Since then, we’ve all learnt to forecast at a more granular level, to be circumspect about our predictions, and to spend more time talking to clients, who after all will be the ultimate arbiters.