How teaching a six-year old to play the violin can stop IBM Global Business Services becoming the world’s first phantom firm

By Edward Haigh.

A few years ago I attended an analyst summit organised by IBM Global Business Services in Madrid. For anyone who hasn’t had the chance to attend an analyst summit, they’re basically designed to allow a consulting firm to show off its capabilities in order to make sure that analysts understand what it does and are minded to say nice things about it to clients. 

IBM’s analyst day was, typically, a beautifully organised event at which analysts were treated like royalty and swept from room to room to meet leaders and luminaries, before being served an extremely agreeable dinner in the sophisticated surroundings of an elegant hotel. 

Being IBM, technology played a central role in the proceedings. Watson was persuaded to resist the urge to design the menu for dinner, but was given carte blanche to show off as much as possible in every other way. And a number of hugely impressive clients including–as I remember it–someone from NASA, were lined up to demonstrate how they were using IBM technology to achieve the most extraordinary things. Stellar things. Literally. 

But as I stood there being guided through distant parts of the galaxy by the bloke from NASA and his trusty assistant, Watson, I realised something was bothering me. And it kept bothering me until I was waiting for my flight home in the vast and vacuous halls of Barajas airport, with about twelve of the many millions of passengers the airport planners had obviously expected would be joining me, and an embarrassment of space in which to think.
 
Then I realised the problem. I’d been to IBM analyst days before and they’d followed a remarkably similar formula to the one in Madrid. Someone from IBM would start by providing us with some impressive facts about the amount of data being created around the world every nanosecond, or about the number of Russian computer nerds who knew what I’d had for breakfast that day, before introducing a gleaming piece of IBM technology (usually Watson) that could make sense of this slightly scary–but opportunity-laden–new world in which we all found ourselves. Following which, they’d persuade a wow-factor client to tell us how he was applying the technology to help him interpret what information the cosmic microwave background contained about the origins of the universe. Or to work out how many customers were likely to buy red underwear if it rained next Tuesday. 

At first glance this approach looked spot on–by rolling out its clients in this way IBM was turning what might, otherwise, have sounded like an impressive but impenetrably confusing piece of technology into a solution to which I could relate. At which point my choice of the cosmic microwave background and red underwear to illustrate the point seems a little ill-advised. Moving on swiftly…

What I came to realise was that there was something missing. And, with room to let my mind wander, I started imagining IBM as Stradivarius, the 17th and 18th Century maker of violins (and violas and cellos). Seen in that way, what became clear about IBM’s marketing efforts–of which the analyst summit was a part–is that they were focused on two things: showing the world its magnificent violins, and then inviting the most feted musicians of the age to come and play them in front of everybody. The result, of course, was some exquisitely beautiful music, and that may have served IBM’s purposes generally. But it wasn’t really doing much for its Global Business Services division–the consulting part of IBM. In Stradivarian terms, what was missing was the bit where IBM teaches people how to play the violin. Or even teaches them about music generally. Worse: the niggling impression was that it didn’t even know how–that it made violins that were good enough to win favour among the world’s greatest musicians, but when it came to the question of how to turn a six year old girl–scratching out noises so painful that even her cat was minded to move into a different room–into a virtuoso violinist; well, that was a job for someone else. 

But it wasn’t a job for someone else, was it? For Global Business Services, that was surely the whole darned game. How wonderful to have the violin to start with, and a long queue of gifted violinists to show what could be done with them (the output bit that so many consulting firms singularly fail to talk about) but what an opportunity Global Business Services was missing in its marketing to connect the two!

Fast forward a few years and what we have is starkly conflicting data about IBM. On the one hand our global client survey consistently finds IBM Global Business Services to be one of the most respected firms in the world. In fact, among more than 8,000 responses by senior end users of consulting services to our most recent survey, IBM Global Business Services was revealed not only to be the most talked about firm, but also to be the top-rated firm for the quality of its work. 

But on the other hand, we frequently speak to consultants in other firms, and even to clients, who are a little bit surprised to hear that IBM still has a consulting division. “I don’t think they’re really in that game any more” one client told us recently. And even among those who work for IBM Global Business Services, and are therefore fairly certain it exists, we suspect we could easily find a few people who’d be surprised to hear they were beating the likes of Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey and BCG to the top spot in our survey. Certainly the firm’s market share belies the idea that it’s the most recognised and respected brand in management consulting.

What does all this mean? Hard data and anecdotal evidence consistently support the idea that the IBM brand still looms large in people’s minds, to the extent that we’ve heard about it being invited back for another go when it’s got its first attempt at a client pitch a bit wrong (who else would get a second invitation?). But we suspect that what people are really loyal to, however much we try to ask them about Global Business Services, is the wider IBM brand. How else can we explain the fact that, despite overwhelmingly positive client sentiment, Global Business Services is not only failing to dominate the consulting landscape, but even failing to convince everyone that it has a consulting division? 

That’s both a problem and an opportunity, and to my mind it all comes back to the Stradivarius thing: for all the plaudits that IBM garners for the quality of its violins; for all the friends it has who can play those violins as sweetly as angels, what IBM needs to do is convince the world, and her long-suffering cat, that it can turn that little girl into the next great musician of her age. And that it can make you a great musician, too. That it knows how. It’s a marketing challenge and it’s one that becomes more pressing with every passing day if IBM Global Services isn’t going to turn into the world’s first phantom firm: the firm that everybody loves, but actually doesn’t exist.