Welcome to the GCC – please forget everything you know

Crazy people, clients. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about their perceptions of consulting firms in the course of conducting our surveys it’s that their views are changeable and often counter-intuitive. One minute (or at least one year) they think Firm A is brilliant at something, the next they’re not so sure. One minute they tell you they’re not sure Firm B delivers much in the way of value, the next they tell you they’ve recommended the firm to other people.

The same thing goes for the firms they rate most highly for various consulting services: some things are much as you’d expect – finding Big Four firms featuring prominently for financial management and risk, or strategy firms for strategy – but there are just as many cases of a firm being highly rated for something you wouldn’t expect. IBM for strategy. L.E.K. for HR and change management.

But nowhere do clients views surprise quite as much as they do in the GCC. Where you’d expect to see Firm A you see Firm B, and vice-versa. Why?

We suspect there are several parts to the answer. The first is about maturity. While there are clients in parts of the GCC (most notably the UAE) who look as mature as clients anywhere else in the world when it comes to their use of consultants, there are plenty who are relatively new to the game. They’ve got less knowledge and experience to call on, and may use firms for a much broader range of services than those with which it’s normally associated.

The second is about the make-up of the region from a political, economic, social and technological perspective. This is a region where issues related to talent reign supreme, and as a result firms associated with HR-related work often feature far more prominently outside their heartland than you’d expect them to. Everything is seen through the lens of talent.

But we also wonder if this is about the GCC being a relatively blank canvas onto which consulting firms are projecting new images of themselves. Elsewhere in the world those images would have to compete with pre-conceived notions in the minds of clients, which say, for example, that Accenture is a “technology” firm. Or that BCG is a “strategy” firm. But while parts of the GCC have been using consultants for long enough that they follow the same pattern, others don’t. Their ideas about consulting firms have been forged in the furnace of very recent history, one of the biggest features of which has been convergence. And because they have, they tell us a lot about the future.