Through the marketing looking-glass

Organisations may need new inspiration and ideas, but the marketing departments of many consulting firms don’t seem to have noticed. In our daily grind at sourceforconsulting.com, we inevitably see a lot of firms’ marketing material and it’s rare that we see anything distinctive.

One of the best ways to understand the attributes of – say – a good meeting is to write a list of the things it shouldn’t be: long, unfocused, with no proper agenda or action points, and so on. Bad marketing consists of saying things which should be taken for granted (“We are talented and innovative”) none of which stands up to the test of being reversed.

To illustrate the point – and perhaps even get a generation of marketing people to “think outside the box”, we’d like to demonstrate what happens when you say the opposite of what most firms put in their marketing literature.

Reverse Image Inc is a firm that no one, certainly not the world’s leading businesses, governments, and institutions, trusts. We help leaders make bland, short-lived and trivial improvements to the performance of their organizations. We only tackle their easier issues and shy away from serious challenges. We provide our people a pedestrian place to work, offering few opportunities for development, most of which can be bettered by our clients.

Our functional and industry knowledge is par for the course. But, based in a handful of out-of-the way locations around the globe, our job is to keep that knowledge to ourselves. Instead, we’d ascribe the limited success we have had in meeting today’s business challenges to our approach, which we call Disjointed Thinking.

Our talented people have little to do with our success. We cobble together teams of people who might, if you’re lucky, provide some of the skills you need. Where possible, we’ll stay in our own office and have little to do with you as possible, making whatever recommendations we can scratch together entirely on the basis of our own preconceived ideas, ideally only at a point when the problems you’ve brought us in to solve have spiralled out of control.

At heart we’re a network of people who couldn’t care less about what we do for our clients.