Thursday 3rd May, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
For consulting firms marketing is a tricky business.
A perennial challenge is to figure out how to communicate a client experience that is so tied up in the people clients meet. That’s tough enough, but increasingly, marketing departments will need to work out how they add robots, software, and assets into the mix. And as firms vie for a position in the transformation market, communicating how your unique end-to-end, strategy-through-execution approach is different from everyone else’s unique end-to-end, strategy-through-execution approach adds another dimension to the marketing challenge.
Our research uncovers another, quite startling issue: that consulting firms’ marketing is most effective among those that are already heavy users of a firm. In effect, marketing is preaching to the converted.
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.
Monday 5th Sep, 2016
By Edward Haigh.
Want something done? Establish a clear set of objectives, set aside a budget, pull a team of people together, and let them get on with it. Unless, that is, you’re dealing with the marketing department of a consulting firm.
Earlier this year, marketers and their bosses in around 30 consulting firms were kind enough to give us their views on a variety of issues about marketing. It was an important exercise because consulting firms are indeed setting aside very sizeable amounts of money for marketing and pulling together armies of people to spend it. What the results show, though, is that the one thing consulting firms aren’t doing is letting them get on with it.
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