Thursday 16th Nov, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
It’s decades since Theordore Levitt wrote about what he terms “marketing myopia”, the extent to which people and organisations underestimated the potential size of their market because they viewed it through a narrow, pre-determined lens. If you’re trying to sell screws, the problem is not that every solution is a screw but that you only see screw-related opportunities: there’s a bigger market out there, if only you saw it as fixture-related.
I was reminded of this idea recently when talking to a client about how the wTheordore Levittay in which they use professional services may change in the future. A wide-ranging discussion ended up with both him and me realising that we needed to see the market differently, through a different lens if you like.
Tuesday 14th Nov, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
It’s almost a decade since the Global Financial Crisis barrelled into consulting revenues, causing what was probably the single biggest downturn the industry has ever experienced. In the years that have followed, we’ve seen some markets recover more quickly than others (Germany compared to Belgium, for example), but through it all there’s been one constant—the importance of the US market. Now there’s signs that could be changing.
Tuesday 10th Oct, 2017
Zoë Stumpf.
As an analyst (rather than an on-the-ground consultant), it can be easy to dismiss a consulting market when it seems so troubled that there appear to be few prospects of things going right. Brazil is one such market. The volume of consulting work barely grew at all in 2016, having contracted in 2015. The economic situation is dire—the economy has shrunk by more than 7% in the past two years—and is also beset by high unemployment and a crippling budget deficit. Well-documented political shenanigans have been hugely destabilising—with impeachment followed by meatpacking scandal followed by further impeachment worries—and have hit investor confidence hard. Bear in mind, too, that this is the country that gave us the delightful (at least to the disinterested observer) notion of the “chicken flight”—the idea of a hopeful surge in economic performance, swiftly followed by a fall to earth—and that was when times were relatively good, with Brazil proudly occupying its position as one of the then-fabled booming BRICS.
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